


Good Intentions

by storyandshark



Category: Outlast (Video Games), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Established Relationship, F/F, M/M, Memory Loss, Occult, POV Alternating, corporation being shitty, i am here to cause pain, y'all when I say major character death I mean major character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2020-09-19 04:30:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 16
Words: 32,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20325133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyandshark/pseuds/storyandshark
Summary: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In this case, hell is Mount Massive Asylum, a mental institution owned by the corrupt and powerful Magnus Corporation. Everyone knows that something terrible is being done there, but attempts to uncover the secrets may only serve to unravel everything further.Gerard tries to right the wrongs his mother committed. Basira searches for her partner and finds far more than she could ever have anticipated. Martin attempts to keep himself alive to find someone he can only hope isn’t dead. Melanie investigates the asylum after receiving a message about the events happening there.All four have good intentions, but on the road they’re on, there’s no way to go but down.





	1. Message Sent

Gerry inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and pressed send.

It only took half a second for the email to go through. Thank fuck for corporate-grade WiFi.

And then it was done.

Gerry stood from his chair and closed the laptop. Really done. He’d just betrayed his mother, his coworkers, his entire life, and he’d be damned if it didn’t feel good. Well, mostly. Despite all the precautions and safety measures he’d taken, the all-encompassing terror of getting caught was needling into his brain. Much like the actual, physical needles that might get stuck into his brain if anyone found out what he’d done.

But that was a problem for later. Right now, he had to go out and pretend nothing was wrong. He’d gotten quite good at that over the past few decades of being around his mother.

After listening at the door for a few moments to make sure no one was nearby, Gerry stepped out of the maintenance closet he’d been hiding in and into the painfully bright hallway. The way the lights bounced off the walls, floor, and ceiling — all completely white — always gave him a headache. A few scientists and security officers were shuffling around down the hallway, but as per usual, they paid Gerry no attention. They were either jealous or intimidated. Maybe both.

He’d only made it about five steps down the hallway when he heard his mother’s voice. “Gerard! There you are.”

Gerry winced, braced himself, and turned to face her.

Mary Keay was not a large woman — Gerry was a head and a half taller than her, easily — but she was imposing all the same. Her sharp business suit was crisp and well-kept, the dark tattoos etched around her head and hands meticulous, her demeanor confident in the fact that she was in control. The smile across her face only widened the pit of dread in Gerry’s stomach.

She began to talk as soon as she’d come close enough to have a conversation at normal volume. “You should come down to the lab,” she said.

“Project Walrider?” Gerry asked, even though he already knew the answer.

Mary nodded. “The host is exhibiting some truly fascinating behaviors. If you’re really going to inherit this branch of the company from me, you’re going to need to be intimately acquainted with Project Walrider.”

“Yeah, I guess I would.” Gerry kept his statement as neutral as possible to stop the trepidation from leaking into his voice. “What’s going on with her?”

“You’ll have to come and see.” With that, Mary walked past Gerry and down the hallway toward the lab.

Hesitating only for the briefest second, Gerry followed her. He’d always hated that lab. Anything else with Project Walrider, he could stomach. But that lab, the Morphogenic Engine in all its terrible glory, the awful white sterility of it all while Mary’s most prized subject was tortured… He hated it. That lab was everything Mary stood for, everything she’d tried to push onto Gerry since he was born.

But he followed her anyway. He had to. This would be the last time, he told himself. Magnus Corporation might own all the big press companies, but they wouldn’t get the freelancers. All Gerry needed was one of them to come investigate. Just one, and his mother’s dream would come crashing down, hopefully dragging the rest of Magnus along with it.

The scientists were practically buzzing with excitement as they flitted around the lab, checking monitors, adjusting the main system of the Morphogenic Engine. Only one of the glass pods was full: the one that was always full, the one that held the host. The one that held Agnes Montague, drugged into sleep filled with constant nightmares, holding the Walrider inside of her.

Agnes’s pod was filled with the little black particles that were, at least in some capacity, the Walrider. There was much more activity there than usual. More than that, though, was the fact that she was moving. Some physical reactions during her forced sleep were expected, but now the movement was constant. Agnes was thrashing, trying desperately to escape the restraints holding her. She couldn’t speak through the breathing tubes in her mouth, but she was making noises, something between moaning and screaming. Her eyes, held open to stare at the constant images flashing in front of her, were moving, darting around the room, looking everywhere she could with her head locked in place.

Agnes Montague was awake.

“She no longer needs to be sedated,” Mary said, leaning up to the plexiglass that blocked the monitoring room from the main chamber. “Her nanite production rates haven’t dropped, and she’s still maintaining control over the Walrider itself.”

“The first stage of autonomy,” Gerry said, more out of reflex than anything else.

Mary smiled fondly, though it seemed to be aimed more at Agnes than at him. “Yes. Now that she has achieved this state, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be able to isolate the Walrider from her.” She reached over and squeezed Gerry’s shoulder. “We’re so close. All these years of effort will finally reach fruition.”

Gerry swallowed heavily. “Yeah. We’re close.”

“Once we can find at least one other host to produce its own nanites, we’ll be able to endlessly manufacture the Walrider. We’ll have complete control of each. Imagine — an army of invulnerable swarms under our complete control. Magnus can’t deny our dream anymore.” She sighed heavily, shaking her head. “_My_ dream. I’m disappointed in you, Gerard.”

Gerry tensed. She _knew_. “What?” Even with all his years of practice, he couldn’t keep the slight tremor from his voice.

“You’re my son, but that doesn’t mean we don’t monitor you. I know everything that happens inside these walls, but I never thought you would do something to betray me.” Her voice cracked, her unshakable composure cracking with it. “How could you?”

“Come on, don’t tell me you can’t see that!” Gerry pointed sharply at Agnes, who was writhing and trying desperately to scream. “Don’t tell me you don’t think this is wrong. And how many other people died when they were exposed to the Engines?”

“All progress has a price, Gerard. We are making the most incredible scientific advancement of this century. We have harnessed a _legend_, something that you would see destroyed because of a few lives lost.”

“A few-” Gerry stammered incredulously for a moment, unable to summon the words. “We’ve had ten patients die in the last _month_! We’re supposed to be helping them, Mary, not killing them.”

Her expression darkened, lines creasing her face. “Don’t call me Mary. Traitor or not, you are still my son, and I am still your mother.”

“No. I’m done with this bullshit. I’ve followed along with your vision for too long. It’s time for this to end.”

Mary’s face fell into a sad smile. “A few little reporters won’t stop us, Gerard. We have ways of making people quiet. Declare them as mentally unstable, intern them here, and they’re no longer a problem. If any of them even come here, that is. I highly doubt any freelancer would have the courage to go against Magnus.”

“It’s a start,” Gerry said. “All it would take is one of them being smart to bring this whole thing down.”

She sighed heavily again, closing her eyes briefly. “No, they won’t. You can’t see what I see, son. I thought you could, but… I guess I was wrong. I don’t know if I’m more disappointed in you or in myself. I tried so hard to raise you right. Where did I go wrong?”

The sorrow in her voice was almost genuine. Or maybe it was actually genuine. Gerry didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He knew all too well what manipulation looked like.

“You went wrong by trying to make me into you, _mother_.” Gerry spat the word, bitterly sarcastic. “And it almost worked. But I woke up, and I’m not just going to sit there and let this happen anymore.”

She hesitated before she spoke again. “Clearly, I made a mistake in my assumptions. Maybe if you can’t see how important Project Walrider is from the outside, you’ll be able to see it from within.”

Gerry felt like all the air had been pulled out of him. He’d expected consequences if he’d been caught, sure, but not like this. He knew exactly what she was saying, and the fear it sparked in him was more than anything he’d felt before.

“You wouldn’t…” He trailed off, unable to finish the thought.

“I made a mistake in underestimating you. Don’t do the same to me.” She smiled again, something between sadness and cruelty. “I won’t let it drive you completely mad. All I want to do is get rid of this ridiculous notion that our work here should be undone. A few days of exposure to the Morphogenic Engine and you’ll be as good as new.” She reached forward to place a hand on his cheek. Gerry was too frozen to flinch away. “I’m going to fix you, Gerard. I’m going to be the mother you deserve.”

“_Fix me_?” Gerry hissed as he felt two security guards grab him firmly by the arms. “You think driving me insane is going to fix me?”

“Of course not. All I want is for you to open your eyes.”

A sharp mixture of emotions churned inside Gerry’s stomach as the guards led him away. Fear, anger, grief, pride, hate, shock. Too many things all at once.

He tried to hang onto the thought that maybe, just maybe, one of the reporters would come. One of them would come, they would expose the asylum, expose Project Walrider, expose Magnus and all their bullshit. Maybe they’d even come soon enough to save Gerry.

But he knew that wouldn’t happen. Throughout his entire life, he’d always known that he could only rely on himself.

No one was going to help him, and the way things were going, he sure as hell couldn’t help himself. 


	2. Walk Away

Basira stepped up to the wide double doors of Mount Massive Asylum, pulling her coat tighter around herself in the driving rain. Without a moment’s hesitation, she pushed one door inward to open it. If she were still with the force, she could write them up for a fire code violation — doors in public facilities, especially one as large as this, should never open inwards. Should have thought about that last time, though she had been a bit preoccupied then.

The first thing she noticed as she entered was the lights. Dim, much dimmer than they should be. A quick glance upward revealed that the bulbs in the ceiling appeared to be of normal size, which meant they just weren’t receiving enough power. Big place like this up in the mountains meant it had its own on-site generator; they’d know how much power they’d need for the lights. So where was all that power going?

Something very sketchy was going on. Of course, Basira had already known that. From the moment her precinct had denied her a warrant when she’d tried to find out what had happened to Daisy, she’d known. Magnus was a big corporation, big enough to buy out a police department. Big enough to buy out almost anything. And this asylum, this completely isolated place in the middle of nowhere? Perfect place to hide something.

“How… Um, can I help you?” said the receptionist. At least, that was what Basira assumed he was despite the very obvious security uniform, considering he was at the front desk.

“I’m here to visit a patient,” Basira said, getting straight to the point.

A small look of surprise crossed the receptionist’s face. “Oh. Yes. Full name? Yours and the patient’s.”

“Basira Hussain. Here to see Dai- Alice Tonner.”

The receptionist stared blankly at his computer for a long second. “Right. One moment.” He picked up the phone on his desk, waiting just long enough to connect. “Hey. Police officer’s here again. Get Keay.”

Was this the same receptionist as last time? No, too pale. He wouldn’t recognize her face, and she wasn’t in uniform. The staff here had been warned about her, then. That didn’t bode well.

“Police officer, huh?” she said, one eyebrow raised as the receptionist put the phone back on the receiver.

He fumbled for his words. “Uh, yeah, we- we got briefed on you last time you came to check on Alice. Since she’s a- a high-security patient and all.”

“Hm.”

“There are chairs over there, if you want to wait.” The receptionist gestured vaguely, focused mainly on not looking Basira in the eye.

“No, here is fine, thanks.”

He fidgeted nervously. That meant Basira was a threat. She’d gotten close to something last time, which she had suspected ever since they started demanding a warrant. She’d made sure to get some informants before she came here, people who would talk if she disappeared. People outside of the police, outside of the mainstream press, outside of anything Magnus could buy. Basira was not going to be wiped from the face of the earth like Daisy had been. She was going to bring Daisy back and bring down whatever operation was going on here in the process.

“Which Keay?” she asked after about a minute of waiting.

“Sorry?”

“Mary or her son?”

“Mary. Gerard doesn’t have the authorization to allow visits to the highest-security patients. Mary and the doctors and guards assigned to each patient are the only ones that have it.”

Basira nodded, considering. “Haven’t seen many doctors around here.” Another quick scan of the lobby. No patients. No doctors. Only security.

“They’re all with the patients,” he answered.

“All of them? As I understand it, there’s a fair number of patients in this block. Why haven’t I seen any doctors around?” She was taking a risk pressing him this hard, but Mary knew the dance well and this receptionist was the only chance of squeezing out information.

“They’re… with their patients.” The receptionist clicked his pen in one hand. More nervous now.

“Right.” She crossed her arms, leaning back on one leg. She wouldn’t get any more out of him.

It took longer than it should have for Mary Keay to arrive. She looked as sharp as always, but her posture was slightly different. Slightly slumped. Not apprehension, like what she’d be feeling with the threat of the police returning, but something more like weariness. Sadness, maybe? Something wasn’t going her way.

“Ah, Ms. Hussain,” Keay said, snapping back to attention, all composure returned under Basira’s scrutiny. “I was wondering when we’d be seeing you again. Wanting to see Alice again, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“Walk with me.” Keay turned on her heel, starting toward the stairs to go up a floor.

Basira followed behind, eyes darting around as she observed as much of her surroundings as she could. “Last time you didn’t even let me past the front desk,” she commented.

“I apologize for that,” Keay replied. “This is a place of healing for the mind. It would hurt many of our patients for police to be wandering around all over the place.”

“What changed?”

Mary turned her head, smile playing at one corner of her lips. “You quit your job.”

Ah. That wasn’t good.

“I did. All I want to do is visit my partner. I don’t need to be an officer to do that.”

“Is that so?” Mary said, pushing open a door leading to another wing of the asylum. “Have you considered that she wouldn’t want to see you?”

“No. That’s- that isn’t something Daisy would do.” Basira winced at the faltering in her voice. “She’s my partner.”

“So you’ve said. She’s also a murderer.”

“I still want to see her.”

“That kind of loyalty is poison, you know.” Keay sighed. “You’d do best to forget about her. Even if she does leave this place, she’ll go straight to prison. She isn’t your partner anymore, Ms. Hussain.”

“I know Daisy. She had her reasons.”

“The Daisy you knew, perhaps. But did you ever know the _real_ one?”

Yes. She had. The Daisy that had greeted her on her first day with a sardonic smile and a friendly bump with an elbow, the Daisy that had guided Basira through her first murder case, the Daisy who listened to ghost podcasts and sang along to the radio during night shifts in the patrol car? The Daisy that had let Basira crash at her place after an operation had gone bad and an officer had died, the Daisy who’d been escorted out of the courtroom during half the trials she attended, the Daisy whose lap Basira had laid her head on as she read a book, the Daisy who’d stuttered and made a joke about fraternization the first time Basira had kissed her? The Daisy with the acute sense of justice, the Daisy that put her heart into everything she did, the Daisy with so much drive and determination and life? _That_ was the real Daisy. It was all the real Daisy.

“You can’t deny visits to your patients,” Basira said, shaking her head slightly, trying to stop her feelings from interfering. “I’m here for personal reasons. Nothing police.”

“We both know that isn’t quite true,” Keay said, a hint of amusement in her voice as she stopped in front of another door. “It’s not too late to turn back, Ms. Hussain.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re suspicious. Have been since your first visit here. But as of now, you aren’t a threat to us. I would prefer to keep it that way, for our safety and for yours.”

Basira frowned. “Are you threatening me?”

Keay just smiled. “There are things here not meant for the public eye. It would be… unfortunate if you were to see something you aren’t meant to.”

“So you’re admitting that you’re hiding something?” Basira tried not to let the surprise and confusion into her voice, but it was impossible. This was simply too weird.

“You already knew that, Ms. Hussain. Many people believe we are doing something unforthcoming here, so your addition to their numbers is not really an issue. But any further and I can’t guarantee that we won’t need to take action against you. I’m a businesswoman, but I have a heart. I’ve already had to do one unpleasant thing today. I’d hate to add to that.”

“I’m not walking away again. Take me to Daisy.” Basira clenched and unclenched her fists, scanning the room. Two guards by the door they’d come through.

Keay shook her head with a sigh. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. She… doesn’t take well to visitors.”

“Take me to her,” Basira demanded.

“You’re far too curious for your own good. It’s a shame, truly, but we can’t afford to have any loose ends now, not when we’re so close.” She nodded to the guards by the doorway. “Take her to the prison block. I’ll figure out what to do with her later.”

“I have contacts,” Basira said, watching the guards approach from the corner of her eye. “I disappear, they tell people.”

“Well, we’ll just have to deal with them too,” Keay said. “I suggest you go peacefully. Wouldn’t want a fight to rile the inmates up.”

“This isn’t over, Keay. I’m going to find out what’s going on here. I’m going to find Daisy.”

Keay said nothing. She just brushed past the guards and walked back the way she came. Basira let the guards escort her, not resisting. She’d always been inventive, able to deal with any situation thrown at her. This one was no different.

Easier to solve a problem from the inside, anyway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright but holy hell Basira is so fun to write?? It's probably because I think she might be the first character I've written that actually possesses both observation skills and incredible Energy


	3. Leverage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never noticed this before now since this is my first time using chapter titles but why is the max limit 250 characters?? In what circle of hell would you need That Many?

Something was happening. Martin didn’t know what it was, but he had a pretty good guess. There was a lot of shouting, a lot of crashing, a lot of gunshots. Four hours ago, all of the patients had been ushered to their rooms and the doctors had rushed off somewhere. One hour ago, the chaos had started. From what it sounded like, there was only one thing it could be: patients breaking out.

He paced restlessly around his room — though the size of it allowed only about three steps in any direction — trying to figure out what to do. He was close to the front doors. He could try to just leave. He could get out of here, get help.

But Jon… Martin didn’t know where he was. Didn’t know where they had put him. Didn’t know what had happened to him. Didn’t know if he was even alive.

No. Martin couldn’t think like that. Jon was alive. He had to be. Absently, he played with the wedding ring around his finger. Right. Jon was alive, he was somewhere in the asylum, and Martin would go and find him. Maybe if this wasn’t a full-on breakout and everything was normal, the guards would let him go see Jon anyway. And whatever was happening, he’d have to leave the room to see what was going on.

Slowly, cautiously, he opened the door. Or tried to, anyway. It was locked.

“Shit,” he mumbled, turning the handle a few more times before giving up.

Before he had even fully stepped away from the door, something slammed into the other side.

Martin yelped and stumbled back, back hitting the window on the opposite wall. The door visibly bowed inward. Someone screamed on the other side, then slammed into the door. They were trying to break in. _Someone was trying to break in_.

Martin’s eyes darted frantically around his room as he looked for a place to hide. The vent was too high up, and he probably couldn’t fit through it anyway. The window was barred. The space under the bed might work, but then he’d be trapped and whoever was trying to get in would find him.

And then everything went quiet. There was no more screaming, no more crashing into the door. The only sounds Martin could hear were his own ragged breathing and the steady ticking of the clock on the wall. After a few seconds, there was a crash down the hall as whoever it was started pounding into another door.

Martin didn’t know what was going on, but he knew he had to get out _now_. Most of the Administrative Block was filled with people like him — people who _hadn’t_ murdered anyone — but that didn’t mean it was safe. Especially if there was a breakout.

Oh, God, if the Administrative Block had someone trying to break into the rooms, then the rest of the asylum… No. Jon was okay. He had to be okay.

Just breathe. In, out, in, out. Fuck, for a person who’d _technically_ checked into this place to get help for anxiety, it sure wasn’t getting any better. Although really, he’d checked in here because Magnus had more or less kidnapped his husband and there was no other way for Martin to get to him, so maybe that should have been a sign.

When Martin went to open the door, the handle fell off as soon as he touched it. The rest of the wood creaked as he slowly pushed the wrecked door open. He poked his head out into the hallway, stumbling back with a startled intake of breath almost immediately. There was a body on the floor. There was a dead, bloody, torn-apart body on the floor.

It took him a few moments of hyperventilating to gather the nerve to try going out again. He closed his eyes, turned his head just enough to stop from seeing the body, and looked down the hallway. Some of the doors were smashed, others thrown off their hinges. The walls were spattered with blood. A woman sat at the end of the hallway, knees pulled up to her chest, her shaking so violent it was visible from where Martin stood at least thirty feet away. Distantly, he hears an angry, bellowing snarl that sounds too much like the voice of whoever had been trying to break into his room.

He had almost gathered up enough courage to start walking down the hallway when he heard voices. Coherent voices.

“Got the barricades up,” said the first voice, shaky but relieved. “She won’t be able to get back in.”

“But- but what about…” a second voice started, trailing off for a while before continuing. “What about the Priestess’s…”

“The goddess won’t attack us. Jude made sure she knew who wanted to aid in her ascension.”

The voices became too faint to hear. Martin stood frozen for just a second longer. Well, they didn’t sound _sane_, necessarily, but they at least sounded human. They probably wouldn’t kill him. Probably. 

He made a point to not look at the floor as he walked toward the lobby. The carpet squished wetly under his feet, but at least he couldn’t see the carnage. The lights were flickering oddly, more so than usual. Martin just hoped there wouldn’t be a power outage.

There were quite a few people in the lobby. No security. All patients. As long as Martin could blend in, he could walk through the lobby and try and find his way to another part of the asylum. No one noticed him as he walked through the crowd. They were all preoccupied by someone standing on the balcony. Reflexively, Martin looked up to see.

It was Jude Perry, one of the few faces that he could put a name to. He’d been in one of the small community rooms with a few other patients when she’d come in, ranting about something he didn’t understand. If the conversation between the two people earlier was anything to go by, she was calling herself the Priestess now. Martin felt more than saw her eyes fix on him, and he shuddered and walked toward the nearest door to get out of the lobby.

“There he is,” Jude said, her voice loud enough to project through the hall lobby. “The one who will help us find the goddess’s chosen!”

Martin flinched, knowing she had to be talking about him. Someone grabbed him by the arm and he yelped, spinning around to face them. A man he didn’t know, his grin eerily wide.

“Uh-” Martin stammered, unable to get words out. “I- I don’t think…”

The grip on his arm didn’t lessen. Martin pulled, but the man was too strong. He just waited there, fully expecting Jude to come down and… do something. He didn’t know what he expected. Flashes of the mangled body in the hallway in his mind made his breath catch.

The man continued to hold him until Jude made her way down the stairs, the crowd parting to let her through. “Your husband,” she said, gesturing for the man to let Martin go.

Martin rubbed his arm where the man’s fingers had dug into the skin. “My husband? Do you- do you know where he is?”

Jude frowned. “You don’t know?”

“No, they haven’t let me see him.” Martin glanced at the floor, deciding that he might as well talk and see if something he said would get her to step down. “They brought him in because he was poking too far into Magnus, and- and something happened to him here, I think. It’s been months and I don’t… I don’t even know…”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you lying to me?”

“Wh- No! I don’t know anything; if I did, I’d have already gone to find him.”

She considered for a moment, then waved a hand to tell him to follow as she began to walk away. “We need to find him. Agnes is finally ready. Magnus has been trying to control her, but she has spoken to me in my dreams. She is ready now, ready to break free of the chains she is kept in, ready to take a new host and rise to her full glory.”

Martin walked after her, eyeing the people surrounding him on all sides. “Who’s Agnes?”

She waved a hand at him dismissively. “Your husband has the power to aid in her ascension. If he were to die before she is ready, it would be… unfortunate.”

The odd, detached way she said the word made Martin shudder. “Listen, if you just let me go-”

She cut him off with a sharp laugh. “Let you go? No. I’m not sure how your husband — our disciple — would receive us. We can use you as insurance.” She paused, tapping her chin with a finger. “Or, if Agnes still finds him unsuitable, your death would fuel him rather nicely.”

Martin felt his blood run cold. He said nothing, just let Jude lead him off to wherever she was taking him. All those people… there was no way he could run. Martin didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew there was no way it was going to end well.

Ten minutes later, his mind spinning and his chest feeling like it was being crushed, Martin was stuck in yet another tiny room. Jude had locked him in. He was still trying to process, still trying to _understand_. If only Jon were there with him. He could always piece things together, even if those pieces were nonsensical and vague. Martin couldn’t piece anything together. Jude was the leader of some kind of a group, she called herself the Priestess now, there was someone called Agnes, there was a breakout, and both Jon and Martin were both certainly going to die. The puzzle was incomplete, but Martin could tell what the shape of it was.

He didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want Jon to die here. He wanted them both to be home, for none of this to ever have happened.

Martin was a few minutes into his latest existential crisis when the door opened. He tensed, expecting someone to come trying to kill him.

What he saw wasn’t that bad, but it certainly wasn’t much better.

The two people (though he wasn’t sure if that was what they were anymore) standing in the doorway were grinning. The skin of their faces was blistered and peeling, cheeks cracked open in places to make their smiles even wider. Their eyes were _wrong_, the pupils and irises shaped in ways that shouldn’t be possible. They were both impossibly thin, bones poking at their papery skin. Their hands were the worst. The fingers were stretched and the way flesh stuck to bone made them look more like knobby, gnarled sticks than part of a body.

“Who- What-”

“Michael,” said the one on the left.

“Helen,” said the one on the right, then added “We’re here to help you.”

They looked more like they were going to eat him. “You’re here to… help me.”

Michael tilted his head. “You make it sound like you have a better option.”

Well, Martin didn’t exactly have an argument to that. “I… Fine. Just maybe- maybe don’t kill me?” He laughed nervously, a sound he quickly clamped down before it became hysterical.

He was on the edge of a breakdown. There was just so much, and he didn’t understand any of it, and none of this was _right_. He was scared and tired and wanted nothing more than to lay down and melt into the floor. But he had to keep going. Jon. Jon was here, somewhere. Martin had to find him. He’d gotten himself into this mess to try and save Jon, so that was what he was going to do.

“Mm, I wouldn’t say we’ve ever killed anyone at all,” Helen said. “Not… _technically_, anyhow.”

“Oh. Good.” Martin looked away from the pair in his doorway to stop the nausea rising inside him. “Lead the- lead the way, I guess.”

In almost perfect sync, the two of them turned on their heels and started down the hall. Martin hesitated. He really, _really_ did not want to go with them. But like Michael had said, it wasn’t like he had any other options.

Martin didn’t recognize the route Michael and Helen were taking him through. They’d briefly passed through the lobby catching the eye of a few of Jude’s… followers? Disciples? Cultists? Martin didn’t have a clue what technical term would suit them best. Maybe he could ask Jon about it later, after he’d found him. From the lobby, Michael and Helen led him through several doorways, several corridors. A different block of the asylum, Martin realized.

After a seemingly endless, nonsensical walk, Michael and Helen finally stopped. An elevator. Because aggravating his claustrophobia was _exactly_ what Martin needed right now.

“I, uh, I think I’ll just… make my own way out from here,” he said. “We definitely should be far enough away from Jude.”

Michael laughed. “That we are. But there are other threats within these walls.”

“Worse threats,” Helen added. “After all, what is a priestess without her goddess?”

Someone — some_thing_ — shrieked. The sound wasn’t human. It couldn’t be.

“There she is,” Michael said. “If you thought your death to Jude would be painful, you don’t want to meet her goddess.”

Helen reached out with one long finger and pressed the call button on the elevator. “You may want to hide.”

There was a different kind of screaming then. A person, terrified. For a moment, Martin thought it was himself, until he saw a man emerge from one of the darkened hallways. He didn’t make it far.

Something, something Martin couldn’t see and which couldn’t possibly be there, lifted the man off the ground. The man writhed and howled. Martin backed away, feeling his shoulders hit the elevator doors. Michael and Helen just watched the scene unfold before them, heads tilted, grins plastered over their twisted faces.

The screaming man fell silent as _something_ pulled him apart. His body split in half, almost neatly except for the massive spray of blood and bone and brain matter and everything else. The pieces made an awful gurgling noise, the body trying to live even when there was no way it could anymore. Dimly, Martin felt something warm and wet and red splash onto him. The halves slumped to the floor and the thing shrieked again, invisible but capable of impossible violence.

The goddess. Clearly not a particularly benevolent one.

Martin couldn’t even scream. All he could make was a high-pitched, keening whine, his entire body feeling like it was going to fold in on itself. He’d just seen… What the _fuck_ had he just seen? His head was spinning, his stomach heaving, everything in him shutting down in horror and disbelief and a thousand other things.

And then the elevator doors opened. Martin let himself fall backward, barely feeling it when he hit the floor. He didn’t think he could move.

That thought was proven wrong when the thing — the _goddess_ — shrieked again, and for a moment, just a moment, Martin could see it. A cloud of black shaped almost like a person, all claws and angles and edges. It turned its head.

And it looked at Martin, its eye sockets hollow black pits that radiated malice.

The elevator doors closed and everything was dark. 


	4. Blind Man

Gerry wasn’t sure if he was Gerry anymore. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think.

He knew that whatever was playing on the screen in front of him shouldn’t be affecting him like it was. It looked like inkblots, like nothing more significant than the Rorsach test. But it was affecting him; burrowing into his head, clawing at his thoughts, making his whole body feel like needles. Making him feel like he was dying, like he was being ripped apart from the inside.

He wasn’t surprised that this drove people mad. Wouldn’t be surprised if it did the same to him.

He didn’t know how long he was in that thing, strapped to the chair, eyes held open. It could have been five minutes, it could have been forever. He was losing all concept of time, all concept of himself.

He was so far out of it that he barely noticed when the power flickered out and his restraints unlocked. He slumped limply out of the chair, absently feeling his head hit the floor hard enough his vision flashed white. He could still see the images, the inkblots, the demons. They were still there, burned into his eyes even when everything was dark.

The emergency lights came on. Gerry curled into a ball, trying to hide himself from the Morphogenic Engine, trying to make sure he never caught glimpse of whatever the hell Mary had done to destroy minds with abstract images. _Coward_, said something in his mind, a voice that might have been his or might have been his mother’s.

He’d been complicit in this for so long. He’d _known_, known it was hurting people, known it was killing people, but the fact that he’d let this go on for so long… He deserved this. He deserved to have a taste of what his inaction had done to so many.

After a few minutes, a few hours, a few days (it wasn’t like time mattered) he finally stopped hiding. He unsteadily climbed to his feet, shaking, head spinning. The Morphogenic Engine was no longer playing on the screen. He was safe. He was okay.

Someone slammed into the other side of one of the glass containment walls. Gerry shouted and staggered back, his dazed incoordination making him trip over his own feet. On the other side of the glass, he saw a patient banging on the wall, mouth open in a scream muffled by the soundproofing. And then she was pulled back, flung into the opposite wall, thrown into the floor so hard Gerry thought he could hear bones shatter. She was picked up again and again, held by some invisible force until she was too broken to possibly be alive.

Gerry felt more than heard the patient on his other side hit the wall. He pushed himself away, watching as the man in the other cell was torn apart by nothing at all, painting the glass with gore and blood.

_Walrider_. Agnes Montague had woken up. And she was _angry_.

Some part of Gerry, some part of him that his mother had given him, the part that was his mother, felt pride and elation. They’d succeeded. They’d done something that should be impossible. The Walrider was alive, infinitely more capable than anyone’s wildest dreams.

The rest of Gerry, the parts of him that were _him_, felt nothing but disgust. He was not his mother. He was _not_ his mother. This was not science, this was not an achievement. This was an abomination, a crime, a monster created by a monster.

He was going to tear this whole fucking operation to the ground.

He pulled himself back to his feet, using the chair as support. Inkblots blinded him again and he had to close his eyes until they faded. Slowly, he made his way to the door, which had at some point been forced halfway off its hinges. He squeezed through the gap, tumbling gracelessly to the floor when another wave of dizziness hit him. Now that he was fully out of his cell, he could hear the distant blaring of alarms.

He also heard the mumbling from a woman leaning on the wall in the corner, moving her hands across a dead control panel. She wasn’t wearing a patient’s jumpsuit. This was a scientist, unable to comprehend the fact that what they’d been working so hard to create had broken out with a vengeance. Gerry turned away from her and walked to the door to get out.

He didn’t recognize where he was. He knew that he’d seen it before, but he didn’t know what it was or where it was. It was a room, with normal-looking wooden walls instead of the glaring white of most of the lab. The residential area of the basement, maybe? Thinking made his head hurt.

Gerry leaned against a table, holding his head as the inkblots filled his vision again. Before he could even clear them up, someone shoved the table from the other side and knocked him to the floor. A man shouted furiously and grabbed his ankle. Gerry kicked until the man let go, still blind as he leapt to his feet and groped for where he thought the door was. He found it and stumbled through, slamming it behind him.

“Can you hear her?” said a voice from nearby. “She’s screaming.”

Gerry’s vision finally cleared and he looked at the man who had spoken to him, who was sitting hunched on a countertop. “Yeah. I think I do.”

The man nodded, scratching at the sores running up one of his arms. “She’s angry. I’m angry, too. We’re all angry.” He looked toward the door, which the screaming man started pounding against, then shook his head. “We’re all angry.”

Gerry left the man alone, continuing on through the rooms. Everything was in a state of disarray. Furniture was knocked over, walls were crumbling, bodies lying scattered like macabre decorations. The Walrider was most definitely angry. The patients were most definitely angry. They all deserved that anger.

Gerry didn’t encounter another living person for a while. He still wasn’t sure where he was. He wandered, knowing that he’d eventually find one of the two elevators. Or he’d run into someone (or something) that would kill him. Except he wouldn’t let that happen. Even with the buzzing static in his head and the feeling that something was _off_ in his brain, he had to survive. Magnus could write off a patient. Hell, they could write off half of their own employees. But they couldn’t silence Gerard Keay, son of Mary Keay, head of the most successful project in the entire corporation.

He’d get out. He could do more than anonymously email some reporters. He could tell the whole world himself, and there was no way they wouldn’t believe him. He would get out of here, if only to see that he wasn’t the only one that got the suffering they’d inflicted on innocent people.

Gerry stopped in what he was fairly sure was a kitchen. No. He knew it was a kitchen. This was a kitchen. Part of the residential area for the scientists and security staff, since they weren’t allowed to leave Mount Massive. He didn’t know which one specifically, but it was a start. It was a start because now he could think, and if he could think, he could figure out what to do.

He closed his eyes, wincing as the inkblots flashed white in the blackness. When they cleared, he started to think. Started to plan. Started to not walk around in a daze, aimless, clueless, easily picked off by anyone or anything roaming the basement. He was in the residential area. He couldn’t go to the main elevator — too much of a chance he’d run into security, and besides, his keycards had been taken when he was shoved into the Engine. That left the maintenance elevator, which was in the back through the hospital and secondary lab, the cafeteria, and then… Then the morgue. Yes. The morgue. Then the elevator, and then he’d be out of the basement.

Gerry began his walk with renewed purpose. He had a destination and he knew how to get there. He walked back through the residential area, figuring out exactly where he was along the way. It made his head hurt like all hell, but it was more than worth it. As long as he could get upstairs, he’d be safe. The Walrider couldn’t get through the quarantine doors, which meant it had no way to the upper levels. He’d be able to walk right out, provided he didn’t run into Mary along the way.

His first diversion came in the form of a patient with a knife. Luckily, his new assailant came at him from the front, meaning he had enough time to duck under her swing. She snarled and tried to stab down, but he shoved against her legs, sending her down and, unfortunately, right on top of him. She drove the knife into the floor, a near enough miss that she slashed one of his legs. Gerry hissed in pain and reached backward, pulling on her other arm to get her off balance. She yelped as he rolled her off him and scrambled to his feet.

The inkblots flashed and his head stabbed with pain, but Gerry was glad he’d taken the time to figure out where he was going. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to run for his life. He ran through door after door, room after room, until the almost-homely wooden paneling became dull, industrial gray. Hospital.

There were a lot more dead bodies in the hospital. So many. Patients, security, scientists, many more so mangled it was impossible to identify them by their uniforms. There was blood soaking the entire floor, dripping off medical equipment shoved to the side, spattered across privacy curtains.

Gerry slipped on the blood-covered floor, tumbling into several corpses on his way down. Luckily, his pursuer did too, howling in anger and indignation. She slid past him, snarling, thrashing, looking like she would tear his throat out with her teeth. And then her attention snapped away. She turned to the nearest corpse of a security guard and began to stab it, again and again and again, screaming until her voice cracked and went almost silent.

_We’re all angry_.

Carefully, not wanting to attract attention to himself, Gerry got to his feet, wincing as the gore squished under his shoes. There’d been a fight here. The patients had swarmed the hospital, he’d guess, and security had fought them, the scientists caught in the crossfire. He couldn’t tell who’d won. He hoped it hadn’t been security. He hoped that some of the people that had been tortured here had gotten the revenge they deserved.

The woman with the knife did not attack Gerry again. Instead, she dropped the knife, staring at her hands. They were covered in blood, most of it not her own. Some of it was. One of her eyes had ruptured, spilling blood down her face and body. An internal rupture, it looked like. A result of Project Walrider. She touched her eye with one hand, then slumped over, heaving in breaths that came out more as broken sobs.

Gerry walked on. There was nothing he could do, not directly. If he had the files, if he knew what prolonged exposure to the Engine had caused to worsen in the woman’s brain, if he had the proper environment, the proper medical supplies, the proper _anything_… But he didn’t.

He walked on.

He’d made it almost all the way to the cafeteria when he heard someone speak. “Hello, Gerard Keay.”

Gerry stiffened. If someone knew his name, the situation definitely wasn’t good. He turned. A figure stood in the corner, just far enough away for the lights to not reach them.

“Who are you?” Gerry asked, suddenly aware of the blood on his clothes.

The figure stepped forward. “Don’t you recognize me?”

And terribly, horrendously, he did.

Trevor Herbert. Admitted to Mount Massive for the hallucinations and delusions he’d been experiencing, likely a combination of his drug use and probable psychosis. He’d been exposed to the Morphogenic Engine three weeks ago, the full immersion instead of the usual introduction to the program with the films. The Walrider had rejected him. He hadn’t become a new host, he hadn’t begun to produce more nanites. Instead, the Engine had progressed his lung cancer by three stages in an hour. He’d been retired from the project and left to die in one of the underground rooms.

“Trevor,” Gerry said. Trevor, who was only dying because of Gerry’s inaction.

The old man grinned, showing teeth yellowed by years of smoking. “Ah, you do remember me. I certainly remember you.” He stepped forward, shaky and unsteady from his obvious pain, his voice strained. But still, he walked. “I remember how you stood behind the glass and watched them put me in that machine.”

Gerry raised his hands, placating. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I didn’t want that to happen to you.”

“Sure you didn’t. That’s what all the others said too.”

Before Gerry had time to react, he felt someone wrap their arms around him from behind, leaning in to speak softly into his hair, breath fanning over his face. “And all the others were lying.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay listen I may have latched onto Gerry as My Boy as soon as I started writing him but that doesn't mean I'm not going to keep up with my normal tormenting


	5. Message Received

Melanie had come to Mount Massive asylum to find a story. Maybe expose some corruption. Maybe shut the place down. Maybe uncover some sort of conspiracy. Whatever she’d come here for, it certainly wasn’t _this_.

This was a fucking story, alright.

She held her camera in a hand that was shaking slightly in spite of her best efforts. She wasn’t filming anything in particular at the moment, trying to regain the ability to breathe more than anything else. Hell, she could probably go ahead and put her camera away. The mutilated corpses in the library were more than enough for anything she wanted to prove.

But she was nothing if not an intrepid reporter, and the way things were looking, she wouldn’t be able to get out to release what she’d filmed anyway.

The front doors were locked. Even if Melanie could bring herself to go back through the library again, there was no way she could get back up to the air vent she’d used to get there. The only way out was through.

Melanie really, _really_ did not want to go through.

Even if there hadn’t been a bunch of corpses in the last room, the atmosphere in the asylum lobby was incredibly creepy. The primary power must have been out, with the dim glare of the emergency lights casting eerie shadows across the walls. There was a tipped-over wheelchair down the hall, its former occupant nowhere to be seen. There are no bodies here, but walls are dented, doors splintered, some of the ceiling lights ripped down. One set of stairs leaning down to the lower lobby looks like it’s close to collapsing.

The email had been sent twelve hours ago, not nearly enough time for this level of destruction. What the hell had happened here?

Melanie wanted to call out, to see if there was anyone else alive. But she’d seen more than her fair share of horror movies, and she sure as fuck wasn’t getting killed in a stupid way like that. Someone had killed those people in the library, someone that was still roaming around the asylum.

Melanie wasn’t exactly one for being careful, but it wasn’t like she had any other options. She could see from where she was that there was no manual lock on the doors, so it must have been an electronic lock. Maybe it had been engaged when the emergency system had been triggered, but there had to be a way to turn it off.

Twenty minutes of cautious poking around later, she found something that looked like a security room. “So… I’m going to guess there isn’t going to be a convenient unlock button,” she muttered to herself, wincing when the sound of her voice broke the ominous silence.

She was right. The computer was still on, but the thing was an absolute bitch to navigate. It was definitely set up for someone who actually knew where things were supposed to be. After five minutes of jabbing at the keys, she finally managed to open the window to unlock the door.

“Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.”

The door couldn’t be unlocked until the primary power was back on. Of course.

And then Melanie heard something. Footsteps. Two pairs of footsteps. Any sign of life should have been encouraging but these were… not. Melanie tensed, scanning the security room for something she could use. The chair wasn’t attached to anything, and it looked heavy enough to use as a weapon. Better than nothing.

Melanie set her camera down on the desk and hefted the chair over her shoulder just before the footsteps arrived at the security room. There were two… two…

“Jesus Christ,” Melanie hissed, stepping back until her shoulders hit the wall.

These weren’t people. They couldn’t be people. Except they were people, and someone had done this to them. And judging by the pale jumpsuits they both wore, they were both patients. _This_ was what Magnus had done. _This_ was why she was here. These two things- no, _people_, their stretched flesh and mangled hands and bloody eyes and too-wide grins.

“You don’t belong here,” said one of the pair.

“You’re a sneaky little thing,” said the other. “Scurrying around where you don’t belong.”

Melanie swallowed heavily, holding the chair protectively in front of her. “What- what do you want?”

“Go down the stairs,” said one.

“Down the stairs,” the other echoed. “Then down again.”

“There, you can restore the power.”

Melanie blinked, lowering the chair but keeping a firm grip on it. “Why-”

She was interrupted by a crashing from down the hallway, followed by an angry shout. Melanie flinched, but the twins in front of her barely reacted except for a subtle tilt of their heads.

“You may want to hurry,” said one.

“The Hunter is not as kind as us,” said the other.

Before Melanie could think of anything else to say, the pair walked away. The crashing down the hall continued, getting more violent with every passing second. Melanie had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t really want to meet the person on the other side of that screaming. She dropped the chair, picked up her camera, and ran.

Something wooden broke behind her. She ran faster, sliding across the carpet and nearly falling down the first set of stairs. She risked a look behind her as she half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs. The Twins had been bad. Whoever the hell this was… she was so much worse. She didn’t look frail like the twins had, but was so muscular that it couldn’t be natural. Her eyes were completely red, her skin a raw pink. There were… things, lumps, abscesses, all over her body, looking like those parasitic insects just waiting to burst out. Her teeth were bared and splashed with blood, just as the rest of her body was. The Hunter. It had to be.

Melanie stopped looking. She leaped down the last several stairs, stumbling only slightly as she hit the bottom, then took off for a darkened stairwell that must have led to the basement. Hopefully, she could turn the power back on and get the hell out. Unless, of course, this was a different basement or the Twins had lied, in which case she was dead.

Melanie barely made it to the basement stairs. She pulled the metal door shut behind her just in time, a body slamming against it not even half a second after. Melanie’s momentum continued carrying her forward, to the edge of the stairs and past it. She curled up in a feeble attempt to avoid breaking all her bones.

She fell down the stairs, legs and arms and back and ribs hitting the concrete. Her entire body exploded in pain as she hit stair after stair, too many, far too many. When she finally landed on the floor and skidded into the wall, she was convinced she was dead. Everything was so dark she might as well have been blind. She drifted in and out of consciousness for a minute or two, dazed and paralyzed with the pain.

“Shit,” she groaned as she uncurled herself, ribs that were clearly broken protesting the movement.

She was lucky she hadn’t broken her neck. Although, she thought as she slowly got to her feet, luck was relative. She was stuck in a pitch black basement of an asylum with someone so tormented by whatever the _fuck_ Magnus was doing here that she seemed to be ready to kill anyone in sight. The Hunter had to be what killed the security in the library. If nothing else, Melanie was glad that hadn’t happened to her.

Melanie inspected her camera, laughing as it flickered to life. Somehow, the damned thing hadn’t broken. Using the dim light of the camera, she found the night vision button and clicked it on. Now that she could see, she realized there wasn’t much _to_ see. Just a dark concrete hallway, which looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade. It probably hadn’t.

In any other situation, the aching of the bruises and broken ribs would have made Melanie stop to rest, but her urge to get out let her walk forward almost normally. The basement was dilapidated and partially flooded, but she kept going, using her camera to see. There were no signs that anyone else was down there, which Melanie was perfectly fine with.

Every step was too loud in the still silence. Water sloshed uncomfortably in her shoes. With every room she went into, the green glow of the night visions made it look like there was someone hiding in the corner, like eyes were peering out of the darkest spaces.

When she finally flipped the last switch to get the power on, Melanie made a mental note to get a better camera. The stupid thing had eaten through three whole batteries as she’d been wandering the basement. Even though the basement was relatively safe compared to the rest of the asylum so far, she definitely did not want to walk through it without any way to see.

Going back up the stairs was somehow even worse than her fall down them. Her whole body ached and she wasn’t exactly looking forward to encountering the Hunter again. Despite herself, she breathed a small laugh. She’d been here for about an hour and she was already treating it as the new normal, like being chased by someone who’d brutally killed at least a dozen people and looked like she’d had a particularly bad run-in with a woodchipper and a wasp nest was something she was used to.

There was no sign of the Hunter when Melanie opened the basement door. That momentary relief was made even sweeter when she looked to the front doors. It had worked. They were unlocked. The lights were still low, but they were brighter, and it sounded like the heating system was on, and the doors were _unlocked_.

And then the lights flickered off, just for a moment. The emergency lights returned. The lock clicked shut.

Melanie felt some sort of awful mixture of terror and rage in her chest. Someone _had_ been in the basement with her after all, and they’d just turned the fucking power back off. They’d been hiding, waiting until she left, and then they’d turned the power off.

Melanie jammed a hand against her mouth to stop her infuriated scream from bringing every person in the asylum down on her. She bent over, her broken ribs sending shocks of pain through her nerves, and allowed herself a moment to just be _angry_. Then she straightened, inhaling deeply, clutching her camera tightly and her resolve tighter. She turned to head back down to the basement-

Except she didn’t. She tried, but arms wrapped around her from behind, holding her tightly. Before Melanie even had a chance to react, she felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her neck. She glanced to the side just in time to see a sickeningly large needle be pulled out of her skin. Immediately, her head started to spin and her eyes began to unfocus.

“Wha?” she croaked, words already thick in her mouth.

The person holding her turned her to the side, lowering her almost gently as she sagged to the ground. A woman. A patient. Not mutilated like the others had been. Confusion cut through the mud in Melanie’s head.

The woman put her hand on Melanie’s face, turning her head to inspect her. “No, you can’t leave yet.” She picked up the camera Melanie hadn’t even felt herself drop, cradling it gently. “Your story isn’t through. With our true disciple… unaccounted for, you may very well earn the favor of our goddess.”

Melanie couldn’t even think clearly enough to know what she was attempting to say in reply.

“Shh,” the woman said. “You’ll need the rest.”

In the moment before Melanie descended into complete nothingness, something moved at the corner of her vision: a dark shape hovering over the woman’s shoulder, its blurred form seeming to vibrate with anticipation. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I just love writing Melanie so much. And Gerry. And Basira. And Martin. I mean, I did choose those PoVs mostly to cause Sufferring, but I sure am having fun doing it


	6. Unidentified

Basira almost wished that the guards had taken her watch. She couldn’t stop herself from checking it, couldn’t stop from realizing how long she’d been stuck. Ten hours. Ten hours of pacing around a tiny padded cell.

She knew exactly what Keay was doing. Sticking someone in an isolated room and forcing them to wait there for a long stretch of time was a basic principle of interrogation. And while Keay probably didn’t need questions answered, she did need Basira’s resolve to waver.

Unluckily for Keay, that wasn’t happening.

Still, it would be much more convenient if Basira wasn’t stuck in a cell. That didn’t exactly lend itself to intensive investigation.

What she _could_ observe, however, were the sounds. Something was very obviously wrong. There had been screaming from other people locked in the padded cells when the guards had brought Basira in, but the screaming had changed. It was more frantic now, more certain. Not only that, but the noises sounded closer, like they were only muffled by one door instead of two.

Through the small, grimy window, Basira could see people wandering outside in the cell block. People in patient jumpsuits, unaccompanied by any orderlies or guards or otherwise. They had broken out, and based on the fact that three hours had gone by like this, no one was coming to fix it.

The patients had broken out. How? Why? Basira didn’t have the answer to those questions, but she very much wanted to find out.

Someone tapped on the window. Basira turned on her heel and had to stop herself from stepping back in… surprise? Confusion? Horror? Most likely all of them at once, she figured.

The man at the window was… Basira had seen some of the patients in the female ward as the guards had led her through it. She had thought there was an infection of some kind being spread, based on the lesions and sores that were on some of the patients, but this man was by far the worst she’d seen.

There were holes in his face. Holes, like little worms had bitten into him and burrowed, going deep enough to sate their hunger and curling up in their new den to wait, and then they would find someone new to eat. Maybe they’d gone all the way into his brain, eating the parts they liked and leaving enough to keep him alive. She could practically see them lurking behind the eyes filled with burst blood vessels. They were waiting there, waiting for him to open the door, and then they would crawl through their tunnels and go to her and then-

No. _No_. Basira shook her head. There weren’t _worms_ in this man’s face. With that kind of damage, assuming the worms had attacked other parts of his body as well, he’d have bled out a long time ago. The holes weren’t deep enough to house a worm anyway; with clearer eyes she could see the scabbing, poorly healing flesh only a few millimeters in. This was the same disease those other patients had. Contagious, maybe, and possibly dangerous, but definitely nothing like brain-eating parasitic worms.

Clearly Keay’s tactics — whether they were intentional or just a result of the breakout — were starting to work. Basira had had to work with those irrational, needling thoughts for as long as she could remember, but the last time they had gotten this bad was when…

No. Focus. Think clearly. Take action. Get answers.

“Hello?” the man at the window asked, barely audible through the door. “Are- are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Basira answered, voice sharper than it needed to be. She stepped closer to the door. “Who are you?”

The man blinked. Hesitated. Nudged his cracked and dirty glasses back into place. He was entirely taken off guard by the question, and it didn’t seem like he knew the answer. Given that he was in a mental institution and Magnus obviously couldn’t care less about helping their patients, that wasn’t necessarily surprising.

“I- I don’t know,” he finally said. “I can’t… remember anything.” He shook his head. “You’re not a patient. And you’re not with the staff.”

“I’m not.” She would have told him she was with the police, but given the history of many of the patients, that probably wasn’t wise.

He nodded. “Good. That means you probably won’t kill me if I let you out.” His tone was edged with humor, but it was easy to tell he wasn’t entirely joking.

She shrugged and responded with a dry “Not unless you give me a reason to.”

He smiled wryly. “I’ll try my best not to.” With that, he turned the handle on the door (Basira supposed a lock wasn’t necessary on something that couldn’t be opened from the inside) and swung it open.

“Thanks,” Basira said, stepping past him out into the prison block.

She’d clearly been right in her assumption that there had been a breakout. Many of the doors were open and the occupants were wandering around, most of them with some form of strange physical damage like the man and some of the people in the female ward. This wasn’t a disease. Even if Magnus didn’t care about the health of these patients, the employees here would, if only for the sake of their own safety. The wounds varied greatly from person to person and there couldn’t have been a way to spread disease through an isolated environment like the prison block. No, this was something else. Something being done on purpose.

Something that could have — no, already _had_ — happened to Daisy.

Basira turned back to the man. He was thin, so much so that it couldn’t be healthy. The circular wounds were on his hands and neck as well as on his face. He had a patient number on his jumpsuit, but no other form of identification. Nothing except the ring on his left hand, which he twisted absently for a moment before looking down. His brow creased in confusion and he shook his head.

He looked up, noticing Basira observing. “I don’t… I don’t remember anything. Well, I guess…” He sighed. “I remember the bright lights, and the buzzing, and- and it felt like there were… bugs inside of me. Apparently I’m married, and for some reason I remember the layout of this place…” He trailed off.

That piqued Basira’s interest. “You know how to get around in here?”

“Yes, I- I think I was looking at this place before I came here. Studying it.” He paused, face contorting as he struggled with his own mind. “There was… something going on. A lot of missing information, things that shouldn’t have been gone. People that shouldn’t have been gone.” He scoffed a laugh, eyes turning down to the floor. “I think I’m one of them now.”

“I think everyone here is.” Basira eyed a woman that drew too close for comfort, tensing until she passed by. “You know how to get out?”

He nodded. “Yes. I just can’t… There’s something dangerous here.”

Basira snorted. “Clearly.” The man flinched slightly, so Basira continued with “Good thing I’m used to handling dangerous.” She extended a hand. “Basira.”

Hesitating only slightly, he shook her hand. “Uh, I- I don’t really…” His voice trembled as he let go.

He really didn’t remember. Basira spent enough time in the force to be able to spot someone lying, and unless this man was really good at acting, he wasn’t. Even if he wasn’t fully mentally stable, if he could act that well, he’d have come up with something more convincing than total memory loss.

Maybe the worms _had_ gotten to his brain.

“I’m sorry,” Basira said, shaking away the irrationality and replacing it with sympathy. In another world, this could have been her. This could have been Daisy.

“It’s- it’s fine. I think there are things I’m better off forgetting.” He sighed. “And things I’d rather like to remember.” He paused again for a moment. “Some people here have called me the Archivist. I don’t really understand why, but I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

“That works for me.” A patient a few cells away screamed, trying to reach out of the broken window and grab another person walking by. “You know the way out?”

The Archivist nodded wordlessly, turning and walking for a nearby set of stairs. Basira followed behind him, keeping a careful eye on the patients wandering around. Most of them probably weren’t dangerous, but there were some particularly horrible murderers here. Add the fact that there was some sort of experiment being conducted by Magnus, and there were a lot of opportunities for potential danger.

At the top of the stairs, a balcony led to an upper part of the cell block, the door out open on the opposite side of the room. That was unnerving. Someone had unlocked it, someone that had the keys, but there hadn’t been a sign of an orderly or guard inside the prison block for a while. The Archivist walked toward the open door, looking even more tense now.

“Pass through the hallway… leads to the male wards,” he mumbled to himself.

“Leaving so soon?” said a voice from one of the open cell doors.

Basira whirled around, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. Standing in the cell was another patient, looking even worse off than the Archivist. Her skin was papery, her bones far too pointed and elongated. She grinned.

“It would be a shame to deprive the Priestess of her chosen, wouldn’t it?” she said.

Basira started to ask what she was talking about, but she was interrupted by a shout from the Archivist. Another patient, a man that looked disturbingly like the woman in the open cell, had grabbed him around the arm.

“The goddess is waiting for you,” the man said.

The Archivist ineffectually tried to pull away. “What- I don’t-”

The man frowned. “Except…” He craned his neck to look at the woman in the cell. “He said he doesn’t remember. Would it still work?”

“Mm, I’m not sure,” the woman said. “Well, Jude only told us to watch the little explorer. She never said anything about what to do with that one.”

Basira stepped aside as the woman came out of the cell, not wanting to provoke either of them to violence. Basira could definitely handle either of these strange twins, but the Archivist probably couldn’t. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

The man released the Archivist, who wrenched his arm away and backed into the wall. “Oh, you’ll learn soon enough.” He raised an eyebrow, looking Basira over. “You don’t have to worry. We aren’t here to hurt you. At least, not right now.”

“You don’t need to die yet,” the woman added. “You don’t know enough to die.”

The Archivist sidled toward Basira, pressing himself against the wall. The Twins ignored him. The woman moved toward her counterpart and they both stood, facing Basira and the Archivist. Grinning. A scream echoed from somewhere past the exit door.

“Perhaps the Hunter can give him some new memories,” the man said.

“I suppose we’ll have to wait and see,” the woman said.

Before Basira or the Archivist could react, the Twins darted through the exit door and slammed it behind them. Basira ran to the door, hoping they hadn’t locked it. No luck. She stared into the leering faces of the Twins as one of them turned the key in the lock.

“If you let us out, I can help you,” Basira tried. “I’m with the police.”

In almost perfect unity, the Twins laughed. She man leaned forward. “So was she.”

Basira’s blood turned to ice. Daisy.

More screams floated from outside. Screams of terror and the fierce cries of a hunting animal. This wasn’t Daisy. It couldn’t be Daisy. It could be Daisy, changed like the Twins or erased like the Archivist… No. Basira couldn’t think that. Not until she knew.

Basira grabbed the Archivist’s arm. “We need to go.”

He blinked, looking confused. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t- I don’t know what’s going on. They… I…”

“Archivist,” she said, making direct eye contact and gripping his arm slightly harder. “Focus. Is there another way out of here?”

“No, they’re all locked. I don’t think-”

The Archivist didn’t get to finish what he was saying. He was interrupted by the sound of violent crashing outside the exit door. Something broke and Basira could hear rapid footsteps getting closer.

She started for the stairs, dragging the Archivist along behind her. “Then we’ll have to hide.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point I am convinced that Michael and Helen have taken residence inside my brain so they can invade everything I write. At least most of the time they're only showing up where I want them to


	7. Melody

Martin didn’t know how long he’d been sitting in the elevator. It felt like forever, but he knew his perception of time wasn’t right and it probably didn’t matter anyway. He was stuck inside of a dark, unmoving elevator. It was so small. Even with no other people in it, it was so small.

He was sitting in the middle of the elevator, knees pulled up to his chest, trying to convince himself that if he couldn’t feel the walls, they weren’t there. It wasn’t working. He was trapped.

He’d been somewhere close to the bottom when the cables had been cut. At least, that’s what he assumed had happened. The elevator had been working normally, descending normally, and then it jolted and fell and crashed at the bottom. Martin wasn’t hurt, but the power in the elevator wasn’t working. He was so close to an exit, but he couldn’t get through it.

Was the air getting thinner? Was the air running out? It was. It was running out. He’d been breathing and using the oxygen and now there was no more air and he was going to die. He was going to suffocate in this elevator. He was going to die alone, stuck in this cramped, dark space. He wasn’t going to find Jon.

Martin pulled in a trembling breath, stopping his hyperventilation. His chest still heaved, but he was in control of it now. He wasn’t just going to sit there. Slowly, he straightened his legs and got unsteadily to his feet.

There had to be something. There had to be.

He didn’t really like feeling around the walls (so small, the elevator was so small and he was going to die) but he knew he had to. He could try to pry open the doors. It would work better if he had some kind of lever, but maybe he could-

Someone screamed above him. For a moment, he thought it was the goddess coming to tear him apart, but then he realized it was far to human to be that. A person. There was a person falling.

Just as Martin had the realization, a body crashed into the top of the elevator. The screaming stopped. Bones and metal snapped and Martin yelped as something sharp and cold slashed down his arm. He pressed himself to the wall, clamping a hand over the bleeding scratch, as something else fell into the elevator. It hit the floor with a meaty, snapping thump.

“Fuck,” Martin hissed, feeling like his heart had stopped and turned his veins to ice.

Tentatively crouching down, Martin blindly groped for what he knew was a body but didn’t want to believe was a body. His hand touched flesh, still warm, alive ten seconds ago and dead now. Martin flinched back, throat closing up, iron band of panic tightening around his chest.

Breathe. Breathe. He had to breathe. He was almost out. This person had fallen through the emergency hatch. The hatch had fallen through. Martin could use it to pry open the door. And then he’d be out. He’d be out of the elevator.

Martin reached forward again, running his hand over the floor. His fingertips hit metal. Trying his hardest not to think of the corpse lying on top of it, Martin grabbed the thin metal sheet and pulled it out. The body rolled limply into the opposite wall as Martin clutched the emergency hatch to his chest like his life depended on it. It probably did.

With a renewed, frantic energy, Martin looked for the doors. When his hand hit a small vertical line, he all but cut off his own fingers shoving the metal sheet in between the doors. After he’d jammed it in as far as it would go, he pushed his weight against it. It pried one of the doors to side, opening it just enough for Martin to shove his hand between the gap.

Martin was almost glad he’d been panicking, since it had given him the buzzing need to move that allowed him to push open the elevator doors. It still took several minutes to get them far enough apart to slip through, but he did it. He was out. He was safe.

Well, safe was relative. It was probably more dangerous to be outside the elevator. But it felt significantly less awful.

Martin glanced back, realizing with an odd sense of guilt that the screaming person would not get the same. They were facedown on the elevator floor, their upper half visible through the doors. Not that there was much left of that that was identifiable. Had they wanted to do it? Had they wanted to escape from something worse?

Martin knew next to nothing about what was going on, but he knew there was definitely a hell of a lot of worse.

Martin wasn’t quite sure where he was. As far as he knew, this place wasn’t supposed to have a basement. The elevators went between the first and third floors, not down. Virtually all of the lights were broken, filling the whole room with shadow. Martin stepped forward, trying to keep as quiet as possible. If there was someone down there, he didn’t want to meet them. He hadn’t been safe in the Administrative Block, and he certainly wouldn’t be safe here.

The walls were gray concrete. There was no sign of anyone in the area. As Martin looked more closely, he could see the small rectangles on the walls, the labels on each one. With a sinking feeling, he realized where he was.

A morgue.

The climate control must have turned off when the power went out. The morgue wasn’t cold; in fact, it was warmer than the upper floor had been. Already, the smell of death was floating through the air.

“I hate this,” Martin muttered to himself as he made his way through the morgue. “I hate this, I hate this, I hate this.”

The morgue was silent and still, but that didn’t make it any less ominous. After what he’d seen, Martin wouldn’t be surprised if the corpses turned out to be murderous zombies. It would be right in line with whatever the hell was going on here, with the goddess and the Twins.

As he walked through the morgue, he found himself thinking about Jon again. Michael and Helen… that couldn’t be natural. There was no way that could have just happened to them. Someone did that to them. Did that happen to Jon? Had he been made into something like that? Had this place changed him into something Martin wasn’t sure he wanted to find?

No. He couldn’t think like that. Martin just had to find Jon and get out of the asylum. That was all he needed to focus on. He could deal with everything else later.

The door was just ahead. He’d be able to get out of the morgue and go wherever this place took him next. That would be okay. That would be better. He hesitated before turning the knob. There was… something on it. Something reddish-brown, smeared with tiny stripes of white. Someone else had already used this door.

Trying to touch as little of the doorknob as possible, Martin pushed open the door. The relative silence that he’d been enjoying previously shattered. It sounded like there was a fire somewhere. Someone was singing in a warbling, torn-up voice, the song discordant and wordless. Martin felt his throat close up, nervousness spiking into breathless fear.

The room he entered was a cafeteria. The tables and chairs were overturned, some of them broken to pieces. The counter was spattered with blood. But worst of all was the woman standing in the middle of the room, singing to herself as she stuck her hands into the corpse on the table in front of her.

Martin pressed his hand over his mouth, stifling his soft cry of horror. The woman was… her body was covered in _holes_. They looked old and healed, but they were still there, still gaping. Many of them were filled with squirming things. White, squirming, worm-like things. Maggots. They were maggots.

As Martin watched, the woman picked through the stomach of the bloody corpse and hummed happily as she pulled out a small worm. She inspected it, holding it between two fingers as it vainly tried to escape. Then, in a careful, practiced motion, she lifted the worm up to one of the holes on her face and pushed it inside.

Martin felt bile rising in his throat as he frantically looked for a way to escape. He wheezed as he struggled to breath, his lungs all closed up from revulsion and panic. The woman’s singing stopped. Martin stifled a whimper, knowing what was happening. She turned, noticing him for the first time, and grinned.

“Please,” he said, hoping there was anything human left in this woman that would understand him. “Please, I just want to-”

She let out a delighted, rasping cry and charged.

Martin ran. He scrambled over a pile of broken chairs as the woman pushed herself off the door he’d just been standing by. Martin wasn’t graceful by any means, but at least this woman seemed to have some difficulty controlling her limbs. She fell on the chairs, resuming her singing with a key change that made Martin’s skin crawl.

Martin sprinted the length of the cafeteria, dodging tables as he went. He slammed into the set of double doors at the other end, wincing as the impact jarred his arm. He reached for the door handle, turned it, and-

The door didn’t open.

“No no no no no,” Martin said, each repetition rising in pitch and terror.

The door still didn’t open. Something was blocking it from the other side.

Martin turned, hoping to find some other place to run. Instead, he turned directly into the woman. Martin froze, breath caught in his throat. He had to move, he _had_ to _move_, but he couldn’t. He was frozen, stuck. Almost gently, the woman took hold of his arms, leaning closer as a maggot squirmed through a hole in her cheek, resting in her mouth as she continued to quietly sing.

And then her song reached a shrieking crescendo and she bent down to sink her teeth into Martin’s shoulder.

That was enough to break Martin’s stupor. He screamed and shoved the woman off, her teeth tearing a good chunk of flesh out of his shoulder. The woman fell to the ground, her unstable body unbalanced, and Martin ran. He couldn’t go to the morgue; he’d be just as trapped in there. His only option was to get over the counter and hope the kitchen led somewhere.

He sprinted toward the counter, barely able to stop himself from slamming into it full-force. As it was, he had his breath knocked out of him and nearly fell, but he caught himself just in time. He pulled himself over the counter, landing messily on the floor, dazed for a precious second before he managed to recover. He sprang back to his feet, scanning the kitchen for only the briefest moment before he began to run again. The kitchen was large, larger than a kitchen in a decent-sized restaurant. There had to be somewhere to hide.

There. A sink, with a space under it big enough for him to fit, its placement shadowed and tucked into a corner where it couldn’t be seen unless someone was looking for it. Martin dove for it and scrambled into the space, tucking himself in as tightly as he could. He clamped one hand over his mouth to stifle his breathing and the other over his wound, feeling the blood run out and through his fingers.

Somewhere in the kitchen, the worm woman sang. Her notes echoed across the room, garbled and strange, broken and squirming. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure at this point I can't write anything that doesn't involve a Bad Elevator Experience. I don't know why that's become what I do now, but apparently it is


	8. On Your Side

“Listen, I’m on your side here,” Gerry said. “I’m not-” 

The second of his pair of captors, whose name Gerry had learned was Julia, jabbed him in the back with her knife to cut him off. “Right, like the son of Mary fucking Keay is a turncoat. Stop bullshitting.” 

Gerry inhaled with tense annoyance, closing his eyes as the inkblots flashed through his sight again. “I want to help you.” 

Trevor made a sound that must have been meant to be a laugh, but quickly turned into a coughing fit. “Who doesn’t want to be a little helpful with a knife in their back?” 

Gerry started to protest, to insist he would help them if only Julia would stop threatening to stab him, but he felt an impact on the back of his head as soon as he opened his mouth. He fell forward onto his hands and knees, the entire world spinning and unfocused. The nausea and delirium he’d experienced while he was in the Engine returned, the blinking images seared behind his eyelids feeling like they were burning their way into his brain. 

Of fucking course. Head trauma was  _ exactly _ what he needed right now. 

“Doesn’t feel so great, does it?” Julia asked, sharply nudging his side with her foot. “Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you let your mother shove monsters into our heads.” 

_ We’re all angry _ .

Unsteadily lifting himself to a sitting position, Gerry jabbed a finger at his face, restraining himself from clawing out his eyes just to get the goddamned inkblots to go away. “She did it to me too. I screwed with her master plan by telling some journalists, and she put me in the Engine.” 

“Enough,” Trevor snapped. “Now, you’re going to tell us where all your best buddies went to hide, unless you want us to just go ahead and kill you.” 

Gerry almost hesitated in answering. It would be what he deserved. These were people he’d wronged, no matter how indirectly. Julia had been irreparably damaged — Gerry had seen a missing eye, the wound too recent to be anything but the Engine — and Trevor was going to die. His condition could have been treatable, had he not been put in this place. Add to that the hundreds of other people Gerry’s actions had killed or maimed, and he certainly deserved nothing less than dying at their hands. 

But he had to get out. He had to tell someone. Without him, Magnus, and Mary along with it, might get out with nothing more than a PR hassle. Gerry could take them down. He had to. 

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll tell you.” 

Julia grabbed him by an arm, hauling him roughly to his feet. “Good boy. I knew you’d come around.” 

When the long pause made it clear that he was supposed to start talking right then, he said “The staff evacuation plan goes through the main elevator. As long as the quarantine doors are working, it should be safe to go through.” 

There was, of course, the fact that none of them had the keycards to open the doors to the elevator, much less use it. But Trevor and Julia didn’t need to know that. 

Trevor nodded sharply. “Let’s move.” 

Gerry led them back toward the main elevator. He didn’t go through the residential area; if he could get them through the lab, he knew how to solve his problem. Granted, there was a decent chance he’d get a knife to the back, but he couldn’t stay with these two. He’d be perfectly happy to help them kill some of the bastards that hurt them, but he couldn’t risk dying to do it. The two of them seemed more than capable enough, and Gerry much preferred  _ not _ being dead. 

The inkblots pulsed as Gerry walked closer to the lab, nearly shattering his concentration. He swayed unsteadily, leaning on the too-bright wall to stay upright. Julia started to snap at him for stopping, but she winced, putting a hand over her missing eye. Trevor began coughing violently. 

“Proximity readjustment,” Gerry explained as soon as he felt he could talk again. “To the Engine, or maybe…” 

Someone exposed to the Engine might have negative reactions when exposed to the Walrider. It hadn’t been studied; the Walrider had never been free like this before. If it was the Walrider, Trevor and Julia were the least of Gerry’s problems. 

Trevor hacked a final time, then seemed to recover. “I bet some of those white-coat bastards are still in there.” 

Julia, hand still cupped over her absent eye, nodded sharply. “Lead the way, mama’s boy.” 

That insult actually raised Gerry’s hackles, but he said nothing. He needed Trevor and Julia to decide to go into the lab. Gerry’s sense of direction was still absolutely fucked, so he wasn’t sure where in the lab they’d actually be entering, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was entering it. 

Gerry continued down the white hall until he came to one of the entrance doors. Observation, he was pretty sure, for victims exposed to the main Engine. Mary had always insisted they be watched for a day after tests. Wouldn’t want to miss seeing the awful side effects tearing them apart from the inside, after all. 

The quarantine door Gerry came across was unlocked. Someone else must have come through here after the power went out; an outage automatically triggered lockdown. Gerry didn’t waste time wondering who it had been. Instead, he pressed the button to open the first set of doors. 

“We have to go through decontamination,” Gerry explained, probably unnecessarily as Julia pushed past him. 

Trevor didn’t respond with words, but he did grab Gerry’s arm and pull him into the space between the doors. With no one waiting on the other side, the doors would close. Gerry hated to kick a terminally ill old man when he was metaphorically down, but he’d have time for his reservations later. As of right now, he had maybe two seconds.

He took hold of the arm Trevor was holding him with and pulled. Trevor staggered and Gerry managed to yank his arm free. In one motion, he shoved Trevor into Julia and clumsily stumbled backward, ungraceful but just fast enough to slip between the closing doors. Trevor and Julia would be trapped inside until the decontamination was finished, which would buy Gerry some time. Not much, but time all the same. 

He sprinted back in the direction he came from, ignoring everything around him and focusing solely on moving. Trevor probably couldn’t run that fast, but Gerry had no doubts that Julia could. If he could get to the maintenance elevator, get himself out of the basement, he’d be able to escape or find somewhere to hide. 

Just as he’d thought, Julia ran after him. She was faster than him, easily, but Gerry had the advantage of knowing exactly where he was going. He swerved around the corpses in the hospital, shoved through the emergency exit — entrance, rather, in this case — to the secondary lab. 

He barely noticed the man curled up in the corner of one of the rooms, his white lab coat smeared in red. The man paid no attention to Gerry, but he did see Julia. With a terrified cry, the man picked up the gun resting on the floor beside him and pulled the trigger. Or, more accurately, he tried to. Julia was on him before he had the chance, driving her knife between his ribs and knocking the gun from his hands. 

Julia had been delayed just long enough that Gerry got the lead he needed. As he reached the hall that led to the cafeteria, he was startled by Julia beginning to laugh from behind him. Confused, he looked over his shoulder. Julia had stopped. 

“I’ll at least kill you quickly,” she offered. “She won’t extend the same courtesy. If you come back here and behave, we might even save you for last.” 

She was baiting him. It didn’t bode well that she seemed unwilling to keep following him into the cafeteria, but it wasn’t like he had a better option. Julia and Trevor wouldn’t give him the chance to escape again. There was no way to go but forward. 

So he did. Down the hallway, Julia laughed a final time. “Good luck, little Keay. Mommy isn’t here to keep you safe this time.” 

Gerry had half a mind to snap at her. To tell her that he’d never needed his mother. To tell her that, even with his complicity in so many horrible things, he’d never be as evil as Mary. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued forward and briefly took in the fact that someone had wedged a chair under the doorknob. He removed the chair and opened the door, hoping that whatever he walked into wouldn’t be as bad as everything that had happened already. 

Someone was singing. Her voice was raspy and garbled, but clear enough to carry a tune. Or maybe not carry one; her singing wasn’t very good. That seemed innocuous enough. Maybe Gerry’s luck would give him something good for once. 

It didn’t. There was a severely mutilated corpse on one of the tables that looked like someone had torn it apart with their hands. Maggots squirmed on the floor. 

Gerry knew whose work this was. Jane Prentiss, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Whether or not that was actually accurate wasn’t clear, since over half the conclusions by the unqualified medical personnel were bullshit anyway, a front to move forward with Project Walrider. Still, whatever had or had not been up with her before didn’t matter. The Morphogenic Engine had chewed holes in both her flesh and her brain. It had also, apparently, given her an obsession with bugs, considering the multiple people she had killed so she could nurture the insects that claimed their corpses. 

Gerry couldn’t tell where the singing was coming from. The cafeteria echoed so much that it could have been coming from anywhere. Or, he decided, it likely wasn’t coming from the cafeteria at all. The door to the morgue was open. Jane had probably moved her operations there. 

Gerry didn’t want to try his luck any further. It was possible that some of the more prominent patients respected each other’s space, but it was much more likely that Jane was incredibly dangerous. The pain centers in her brain had rotted away, as did any parts that might give her empathy or inhibitions. Magnus had taken all of that from her. If she’d just gotten help… 

No. Gerry couldn’t fight this battle again. He knew that he deserved to provide some form of justice to all the people hurt because of his inaction, but he had to get out. Maybe he could help them then, try and find away to fix the damage Mary had done. Maybe he could atone for his sins. 

That meant he was going to have to avoid Jane. He wasn’t exactly in peak physical condition thanks to the Engine, but he might be able to make a distraction to lure her out of the morgue to get past her. 

He moved toward the kitchen. That had a door that led back to food storage, which he could hide in while he drew Jane’s attention elsewhere. As he walked, he picked up the snapped off leg of a chair. 

He clambered over the counter, listening closely to the singing. He still couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but he knew where she was. At least, he thought he did. He hadn’t seen her in the kitchen, and there’d be nothing she’d want in there anyway. 

There was a loud bang from behind him. Gerry whirled around, brandishing the chair leg like it could protect him even if he’d been willing to use it in the first place. Instead of Jane, there was a man huddled under a sink, gesturing frantically at Gerry and mouthing something. 

It looked like “Get down.” 

One of the man’s hands was stained with blood, and Gerry quickly tracked that to its source. There was a bite mark in his shoulder. It was fresh. Unless the ravaged body outside had come back to life, there was only one person that could have been there to do it. 

Before Gerry had time to react, a figure emerged from the pantry. A woman, pitted with holes that housed maggots and worms. Jane. 

“Jane?” Gerry said, slowly putting the chair leg down. “I’m not here to hurt you.” 

It was a stupid gamble. She was violent. But maybe, maybe if someone just treated her like a human being, maybe if someone gave her gentleness and compassion instead of cruelty. He had to try. He had to give her that much. Besides, he was exhausted, and he wasn’t sure he could fight her off even if he hadn’t just been forced through the Engine and to run half the length of the basement. 

“I can help you,” he continued. “If you want, I can take you out of this place. You’ll be safe.” 

She stopped singing, staring at him intently. Her eyes narrowed and her head tilted to the side. She swayed, looking like she was trying to remember something. Then a spark of recognition flitted through her eyes. She knew who he was. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Gerry repeated.

She blinked, appearing to process his words. She looked as if she was calming down. 

And then she screamed. 

She did know who he was. And she was righteously angry. ( _ We’re all angry _ ) Still, that didn’t exactly mean that Gerry wanted to get eaten and turned into a nursery for maggots. So, for what felt like the thousandth time that day, Gerry began to run. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know I was going to make a joke about Gerry embodying that “I’m in danger” meme but honestly that’s just. That’s this entire fic


	9. Numbers

“Oh,  _ fuck _ me.” 

Melanie felt bad. Actually, that was a gross understatement. She felt like she’d been stabbed in the neck and drugged with something that made her entire body feel heavy and fuzzy. In short, she felt like total, utter shit. 

She sat up, looking at her surroundings. Padded cell. Lovely. Even lovelier were the scratchings in the wall, all sorts of stuff about a goddess and a priestess. Melanie’s camera was on the floor, which she quickly collected and held like a lifeline. On the opposite side of the cell, the door was cracked open. 

Melanie scowled at the door. It couldn’t have been left open by accident. If that cultist woman — the Priestess, she presumed — had made the effort to drag her all the way here, she wouldn’t have forgotten to close the door. She wanted Melanie to get out. 

“Well, I guess it can’t get much worse,” she muttered to herself. 

She was wrong. She was very, very wrong. 

Clearly, the breakout that had happened in the Administrative Block had carried over to this section. Patients were out and wandering, no orderlies or security in sight. Some of them had the horrifying bodily mutations that the Hunter had, though none of them on the same scale. Some looked perfectly normal. None of them seemed violent, but judging by the sounds coming from somewhere nearby, someone else most definitely was. 

She had to get out. If the Hunter was anything to go by, anyone that Magnus had royally fucked with could be very, very dangerous. And with the feral, angry bellowing that was coming closer every second, whoever was here was very clearly dangerous. 

Just as Melanie was beginning to cautiously step forward, the other patients in the prison went into a scrambling frenzy, apparently realizing the danger approaching. Some went to hide in the cells, some went to desperately try to force open the doors on the second level. One of the other people in the prison sprinted toward Melanie. Melanie tensed and braced herself, ready for a fight. Instead, the patient — a woman with long hair and flesh clear of Magnus’s meddling — grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back into the cell before Melanie had the chance to react. Melanie gripped her camera, hoping to use it as a blunt weapon, but the woman let her go and backed away, hands up and placating. 

“We need to hide,” the woman hissed. 

“Nah, I figured I’d try and fight my way out,” Melanie snapped, not entirely sure if she was joking or not. 

The woman ignored her, turning to swing the door shut as much as it could be without locking them in. “You can’t.” 

The finality in the woman’s words sent a chill up Melanie’s spine. Like the Priestess, the woman’s words were clear and confident, full and mostly unmuddled. Unlike the Priestess, this woman wasn’t talking about things that were completely insane. 

Still, Melanie narrowed her eyes. “How do I know I can trust you?” 

Before Melanie had a chance to react, the woman grabbed her and pulled her down under the bed, squeezing both of them fully into the small space. “You can trust me more than you can trust her,” she said, voice a quiet and urgent whisper. 

Melanie would have fought, would have tried to get away, but the woman’s point was driven home by the sound of rending metal.  _ You can trust me more than you can trust her _ . Her. Of course, Melanie couldn’t know for sure, but she had a pretty good fucking idea. Even if she didn’t know the woman she was pressed against underneath the bed, she was less likely to kill her than the Hunter. 

So Melanie stayed under the bed, one hand on the camera and the other over her broken ribs, which were burning aggressively in her side. “Where are we?” she whispered, keeping her eyes locked on the barely-open door. 

“Prison block,” the woman replied. 

Well, that should have been obvious. “How’d  _ she _ get in here? Shouldn’t the prison be, you know, secure?” 

“You don’t need to stop people from getting in, just getting out. Besides, whatever the bastards did to her…” 

“I saw her.” 

The woman inhaled in a sympathetic wince. “Then I’m assuming you don’t want to see her again.” 

“Not if I can help it.” Melanie could hear the Hunter’s loud footsteps outside, the sound grinding its way into her head. “I’m Melanie,” she said, just so she wouldn’t be stuck hiding under a bed with a complete stranger. 

“Sasha.” 

And they waited. Melanie wasn’t convinced that hiding under a bed was the best option, but it wasn’t like she had a better idea. The prison was far too open for another hiding place, and the Hunter certainly knew her way around the place much better than Melanie. No option but to wait, then. 

The sounds around the prison block continued. Screaming. Running footsteps. Wet, meaty tearing. The rough, slow breaths of the Hunter mixing with the panicked inhalations of the people she was fighting. If it could even be called fighting. Knowing what the Hunter was like, it was probably more of a slaughter. 

Melanie and Sasha didn’t have to wait for long. Without any sort of preamble, the door was thrown open with so much force it came off of all but one of its hinges. Melanie didn’t breathe. The Hunter stepped into the cell. Sasha tensed, pressing closer into Melanie, the fingers of one hand knotted in Melanie’s jacket. The pressure Sasha was unknowingly putting on Melanie’s broken ribs sent agony shooting through her and she bit her tongue to keep from making a sound. 

Drops of blood fell from the Hunter’s hands, each splattering softly on the dirty white floor. “Priestess,” the Hunter growled, words coming out in a strangled rasp that meant whatever had been done to the outside of her body had also happened inside. 

Melanie didn’t move, didn’t breathe, hardly thought. She knew that if she was going to die, she’d rather die to anyone but the Hunter. She’d rather have a chance, a real fight. She’d rather fail than be helpless. 

“She wants it to escape,” the Hunter continued. “I can’t let her… Won’t let it out…” 

The Hunter fell silent. Slowly, she turned from her position facing the wall to look toward the bed. Melanie could feel Sasha’s pulse beat faster and was sure her own was doing the same. The Hunter’s hand touched the floor as she bent down to look under the bed. She knew where Melanie and Sasha were. She was going to kill them. Melanie could try to fight her off, but there was no way she could win, not with the Hunter changed so much. Melanie was going to die, she was going to die here, she was-

Somewhere else in the prison block, there was a sharp clang of metal, followed by a frightened yelp and a cry of “Shit!” 

The Hunter tensed, leaping back to her feet and charging out of the cell. Melanie let out her breath, feeling her veins and heart pushing, pushing, needing her to move. 

“Now,” she hissed to Sasha, starting to scramble out from under the bed. 

Sasha was already moving, reaching out a hand to pull Melanie to her feet. Together, they ran from the cell, both searching for a way out. And somehow, in an unexpected break in the bad luck, there was one. The Hunter was up on the second level, chasing after the fleeing form of a person. The person — a patient, probably — went through the exit door and tried to slam it behind them to slow the Hunter down. It didn’t. The Hunter ran out of the cell block, fixated on her new prey. 

Melanie fixed her eyes in front of herself, ready to make a mad dash up the stairs and out of the cell block before the Hunter came back. She didn’t. Instead, everything  _ stopped _ . 

The bodies. Jesus fucking Christ, the  _ bodies _ . 

There had been several people in the cell block that hadn’t been able to hide as successfully as Melanie and Sasha. These people had been torn apart, limb from fucking limb. Only a few feet from Melanie was a decapitated (could it even be called that when it had been torn from the body with bare hands?) head, face smashed into a bloody mess. There were bits of spine still attached to what must have been the neck. 

This wasn’t the most disturbing thing she’d seen. There had been other dead bodies. The Twins were more grotesque, and what had been done to the Hunter was horrifying on an entirely different level. But this… 

This could have been Melanie. This  _ would _ have been Melanie, if it hadn’t been for some other unfortunate bastard distracting the Hunter. 

Melanie wanted to get out of Mount Massive. But more than that, more than anything, she wanted to bring down the people who had done this. Not the Twins. Not the Hunter. Not even the Priestess. Magnus. Every single person who had let corporate greed consume them enough that they would do  _ this _ deserved far worse than to be torn apart. 

“Let’s go,” Melanie said to Sasha, who seemed just as nauseated and horrified. “We can’t stay here.” 

Sasha started walking for the stairs, at least partially broken out of her own trance. “Fuck,” she mumbled to herself, then, for good measure, added “ _ Fuck _ .” 

Melanie laughed dryly, wincing as she stepped onto the first stair and felt something squish under her foot. “You’ve got that right.” 

They were silent as they moved on, partly out of horror and partly out of caution. Unwarranted caution, though. The Hunter seemed to be gone. Whatever unfortunate bastard she’d been after had clearly known what they were doing. They could also just be incredibly lucky, but since they were in Mount Massive, Melanie figured they didn’t have much in the way of luck. 

“I hope you know where you’re going,” Melanie said as loudly as she dared, keeping a careful eye on the hall around them. 

“I have a vague idea.” 

“Great,” Melanie grumbled. “So we’re lost, then?” 

“Not completely. I know some parts of this place, and there has to be a map somewhere.” Sasha turned to Melanie, flashing a hesitant smile. “Besides, safety in numbers, right?” 

Melanie just grunted in response. Sasha was right, almost. The two of them stood a better chance against the Hunter than either of them did alone. Except, even then, they still didn’t stand any chance at all. 

There wasn’t safety in numbers. They would never be safe again. 


	10. Pieces

It wasn’t Daisy. It wasn’t Daisy. It wasn’t her. It  _ wasn’t _ .

Basira just had to keep telling herself that. The Hunter wasn’t Daisy. Basira hadn’t seen the Hunter’s face before the Archivist had managed to alert her as they were trying to sneak away. All she’d caught running through the halls were a few glimpses, nothing to provide a reliable identification. Now, looking at the Hunter, it was too dark. Basira could see, yes, but not well enough.

Something about Mount Massive was wrong. It had needled its fingers into Basira’s mind, dredging up long-buried paranoia, foolish and panicked ideas of things that couldn’t be real. They weren’t hallucinations; she’d always been able to see things correctly, it was just the interpretation that got out of hand. Her thoughts slipped away from her and spiraled. All she needed to do was reign them back in.

The Hunter couldn’t be Daisy. Basira had barely seen her face, and even then with too much shadow to properly tell. At the moment, Basira was looking out from her current hiding place underneath a desk, trying to keep the Archivist from alerting the Hunter, who was patrolling the room. Basira caught glimpses. The features were distorted, and the dark was thick, but maybe…

No. This wasn’t Daisy. It couldn’t be Daisy because… It just couldn’t be. Basira had to believe that Daisy was alright: she couldn’t let those frantic, prodding thoughts control her. She had a civilian to protect, and then she was going to find Daisy, who was not the Hunter. Who was okay.

Redirect. Concentrate. Focus.  _ Focus _ . Observe. Analyze. Survive. 

Basira heard the Archivist inhale sharply as the Hunter stomped past the desk, throwing open one of the lockers along the wall. Basira shifted as much as she could while remaining silent, ready to move. She and the Archivist were hidden as well as they could be, but she wasn’t sure if it was well enough.

“I can feel it,” the Hunter said, voice mangled but still so painfully, terribly human. “They put it inside us, all of us, it wants to get out, wants to kill… Can’t let it out. Won’t let it out.”

She kept walking around the room, pacing and searching. She had to have known Basira and the Archivist were hidden in the room. She’d been close enough to see them enter; they were only hiding because she was catching up. But for some reason, the Hunter couldn’t find them.

As if answering Basira’s unasked question, the Hunter continued talking, speaking in a furious, frustrated growl. “Too loud, too loud. Won’t get out. Can’t think. It’s in my head, too loud, can’t think. Won’t stop screaming, it’s screaming, too loud  _ get out _ !”

The Hunter shouted wordlessly, the sound dying away as another one began. Not the Hunter. Something…  _ else _ . The sound was too high-pitched, too inhuman. It  _ wasn’t _ human.

The Hunter heard it too. “Walrider…” she snarled, and charged out of the room, chasing her new prey.

The Archivist tried to bolt from their hiding spot immediately, but Basira held him back. She waited until the Hunter’s loud footsteps faded, then released his arm, nearly causing him to fall flat on his face. Basira crawled out from under the desk, keeping a watchful eye on the Archivist, who was breathing so heavily she was afraid he was going into a panic attack. A combination of physical exertion and mortal terror would do that. Hell, if he really had lost his memory, maybe he had asthma or something. That would be bad. Basira guesses a corporation like Magnus didn’t prioritize emergency inhalers.

Basira gave him a shoulder to lean on, asking, rather pointlessly, “You alright?”

The Archivist wheezed a laugh, putting one pockmarked hand to his face and shaking his head. “Oh, I’m just  _ great _ .” He pushed himself off Basira and slumped onto the nearest chair. “At least now I’m rather sure I wasn’t an athlete or anything before.”

“No, I think that might be out of the question.” After a moment, she added “That chair’s covered in blood, by the way.”

“Lovely.” Still, the Archivist made no move to get up.

Clearly, he wasn’t going to be moving for a while. Basira went across the room and shut the door, finding that, rather conveniently, it had a lock. That was odd. Sure, maybe Magnus valued its employees’ security more than their patients — not like that was saying much — but a lock implied a private area, something only certain people were supposed to get into. Something that wasn’t just kept away from the patients, but something that was kept from some of the staff.

Something important. Something that needed to be hidden, even from people on the inside of Mount Massive that knew the extent of its corruption.

Further examination confirmed her suspicions. There were multiple desks, so it was more than just a single private office. And the lockers — that implied multiple shifts of people. The only phones in the room were landlines, and a brief attempt to use it revealed that it was only for internal calls, with contact to the outside world completely disabled. Most telling of all, though, were the files on the desks, abandoned when the workers either fled or were killed.  _ Paper _ files. Mount Massive was a state of the art facility, fully computerized, with its own power supply on top of that. They weren’t keeping paper files out of necessity. They just didn’t want to leave a trail.

“You know what this room is?” Basira said as she opened one of the lockers, rifling through its contents.

“Not exactly. We’re in the male wards — or, at least, I think we are. I was a bit more concerned with not dying. But I don’t think I was ever actually in this room. Although, I suppose I wouldn’t- I wouldn’t really know, would I? I don’t- I don’t know...” He trailed off, sighing heavily.

“Well, if it’s any help, we’re definitely in the male wards.” Basira tossed him an ID card — Dr. Stephen Parkins, Magnus Corp, male wards — she had produced from a coat in the locker, which he tried and miserably failed to catch.

“Hm,” he said, still sounding just a bit distant. “That’s something.” He paused for a while, and as she went to open the next locker, she noticed he was frowning, brow creased in concentration. “Why… why do I know any of this? If I have memory problems so severe they made me forget my name, then I shouldn’t be able to remember…” He scratched at the holes in his arm. “They did this to me. They  _ made me _ forget.”

She paused her search, turning around to fully engage the Archivist. “You said you were researching Mount Massive before. Magnus doesn’t like people pushing too far.”

He shook his head. “No. I  _ know _ this place. Not just from maps. I know it from the inside. And if they could just erase me, why wouldn’t they do it to you?”

For just a moment, Basira felt something cold run through her blood. If he was right… If the breakout hadn’t started, Keay likely would have done the same thing to Basira. Taken her memories. Taken  _ everything _ . Not only would there be no one left to remember Daisy, no one to care, but Basira would be  _ gone _ . Without her mind, without her memories, what would be left? There would be nothing, nothing to ground her, nothing to  _ be _ her.

“Good thing that didn’t happen,” she finally said, her voice much steadier than she felt.

He offered a raw smile. “Yes.” He briefly closed his eyes, appearing to center himself. “My point was that they  _ don’t _ erase everyone. I’d already been here when they decided to do it to me.”

Basira didn’t reply for a moment, choosing instead to retrieve the object she’d been looking for. A flashlight. Of course, there were many other things that might be more useful — namely a cell phone — but it would do. She shut the locker as quietly as possible and went to lean against the desk.

“So they did it for another reason,” she concluded, focusing on the gears beginning to turn in her mind rather than the remains of her fearful realization.

“Exactly.”

“They can contain people indefinitely here. Not legally, sure, but they turned the whole force to their side.” She grimaced. “Except for me and Daisy, and that just landed us here. They wouldn’t have to erase your memories, because you’d never get out to tell anyone.”

He nodded, not voicing the conclusion they both had come to. They hadn’t erased his memories because he’d been investigating. No, he’d  _ known _ something. Something that was dangerous for him to know, even if he was going to be trapped in Mount Massive for the rest of his life.

There were so many pieces. The power being diverted somewhere in the asylum. Whatever had been done to cause the horrific physical effects on the patients. The locked office. The paper files. The Archivist. And that word, the one the Hunter had said.

Walrider.

So many pieces. So few connections. But everything  _ was _ connected. There was something going on, something big, and Basira knew that the Archivist, whoever he was, was in the middle of it. She didn’t know the shape of it, didn’t have a clue what it might be.

She didn’t know  _ yet _ , but she would. She always solved the puzzle, no matter how many pieces. She always unraveled the mystery, no matter how convoluted. She always did.

_ Always _ .

And, she figured, the folder on the desk labeled ‘Project Walrider’ would be a rather good place to start. 


	11. Maggots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wellll this is a bit late, but school has been absolutely murdering me over the past few weeks, so I’m writing much slower than usual. I am definitely going to finish this fic, it just might take a little longer than anticipated.

Martin scrambled out from under his hiding place. He still had no idea what was going on, but worm lady was chasing someone else and he had to move. 

Move  _ where _ ? He was trapped. There was the broken elevator in one direction and the blocked door in the other. 

Except the new guy — the one who clearly didn’t know about worm lady and her tendency to bite pieces out of people — he’d gotten in. That, and something else, something Jon would have noticed, something that Martin couldn’t quite reach, not with the panic in his brain and the blood running down from his shoulder. There had to be a way out. There had to be. 

Martin pushed himself to his feet, looking around frantically for the man. He was running from worm lady, skidding to a halt before the door, the one that Martin hadn’t been able to open. And apparently, Martin realized as the building spark of hope inside him extinguished, it was still blocked. 

“Shit!” the man shouted, narrowly managing to throw himself away from worm lady as she launched herself at him. 

Martin wasn’t a fighter. Hell, he wasn’t an  _ anything _ when it came to situations like this. Normally he did something to prepare himself, or had some kind of plan, or figured out the best way to escape. He didn’t have any of those options right now, not until he could figure out the thing that he almost knew, the thing that would get him out. 

Maybe he couldn’t get out, but Martin couldn’t just do nothing. He was tired of doing nothing. 

Martin clambered over the counter, biting down a cry when pain shot through his shoulder. “Not that way!” he shouted as the man started to sprint toward the door to the morgue. 

The man skidded to a halt, using the table with the dessicated corpse to stop himself. As the worm lady pivoted to try and catch him, the man unlatched one of the table legs and kicked it out, causing the corpse to tumble off and into worm lady. She fell, struggling as the stiffening limbs of the dead body tangled with her own. 

The man ran over to Martin, bracing himself to move again as soon as worm lady did anything. “The elevator’s that way,” the man said, gesturing at the morgue with a mixture of irritation and worry. 

“It’s broken.” 

The man inhaled deeply, pressing a hand to his forehead. “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me.” He was almost laughing, seemingly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. 

Worm lady, meanwhile, was preoccupied. When the corpse had fallen on her, it had knocked many of the maggots out of the holes in her flesh. Humming softly, with a note of tense distress, she rooted through the assorted gore to find her worms, carefully putting them back in their places. Martin felt sick, turning away and covering his mouth. 

Seemingly regaining his composure, the man urgently grabbed Martin’s arm to get his attention. “Listen, I can’t let you die here. This is- it’s all-“ The man shook his head sharply, then redirected himself. “I’m not letting her kill you.” 

Martin couldn’t help but laugh, even with worm lady in his peripheral vision continuing her grim business. “I- I was hoping not. I’m not exactly in a rush to die.” 

“I can distract her,” the man continued. “Help should be coming soon, so if you hide-” 

The man kept talking, but Martin stopped listening. He was still scared — how could he not be? — but his mind was clearing just enough. Martin didn’t have Jon, didn’t have what Jon could figure out even in these types of situations. But Martin was smart, and now he wasn’t alone, and he was the one who had to find the way out. 

The man had gotten in somehow. Probably through the blocked door, which obviously was not an option. Martin had come through the elevator, which also wasn’t an option. Worm lady had clearly been there for a while. She must have gotten the corpse from the morgue, and it had to have been at least several hours, since the maggots… 

The maggots had hatched. They’d hatched from eggs. Eggs laid by flies. 

“Vents!” Martin said, causing the man to flinch in surprise. 

“Vents?” 

Martin shook his head, trying to piece everything together with how fast his brain was going. “Flies. The- the maggots, they-” He stuttered incoherently for a few seconds, his heart skipping a beat as worm lady began to get up. “Are there vents here?” 

The man appeared to take a moment to think before he brightened with realization. “There are vents in the kitchen. Want me to distract her?” He was technically asking, but his tone made it clear he wasn’t accepting no for an answer. 

Martin nodded, hauling himself back over the counter as worm lady charged with a shrieking high note. He didn’t look to see what was happening, but worm lady’s singing continued, all but completely covering the man’s as he attempted to distract her. Martin hoped it was working. 

Martin hadn’t really been looking up the last time — he’d been more focused on not getting killed by worm lady — but the vents were rather obvious. There was one near a stove, easily within reach if Martin climbed on top of the counter underneath it. The only problem was that the grate was still on the vent, making it impossible to get in. 

“God _ dammit _ ,” Martin growled in frustration. It wasn’t enough that he was going to have to crawl through a ventilation shaft to not get eaten by a cannibalistic woman obsessed with worms, no, it obviously had to be even more difficult than that. 

Okay. There had to be a way to get it open. He could probably get the screws out of the grate given time and a knife, but Martin currently had neither. Well, given the structural integrity of the rest of the place, this vent couldn’t be too difficult to break. Quickly knocking a fist against the side of the vent to test it, he confirmed that the metal was cheap and thin — easy to break. 

Martin ran back to the kitchen entrance, looking around the floor for the chair leg the man had dropped earlier. Picking up his new makeshift crowbar, he risked a glance up to see what was happening out in the cafeteria. Worm lady hadn’t quite caught the man yet, but she didn’t look that far off. The man slid underneath one of the few tables that was still upright, dodging worm lady’s grasping fingers as she leaned over the top of the table to grab at him. That bought him a few seconds, but he was clearly tiring. 

“Come on!” Martin shouted, not waiting to see if the man was following before he rushed back to the vent. 

Martin heaved the chair leg up like a baseball bat, ignoring the rough pain it brought to his bitten shoulder and slashed arm. Letting out a cry that was equal parts determination, pain, and fear, Martin used his forward momentum to hit the side of the vent with all the force he could possibly muster. He stumbled and nearly fell, the blow painfully wrenching at his arms, but the sharp groan of bending metal told him that he’d done what he needed to. 

Not wasting any time, he turned back around. The vent had bent sharply inward in the place he’d hit it, popping the much sturdier grate away from that particular spot. Martin rammed one end of the chair leg into the hole and pried at it, leaning all his weight against it. The vent screeched in protest, but Magnus’s laziness paid off. The screws on the grate tore out of the cheap siding and the grate clattered to the floor. 

And not a moment too soon. The man vaulted over the counter and into the kitchen, worm lady right behind him. A flash and panic and resignation crossed the man’s face, realizing that their plan hadn’t worked.

Except Martin wasn’t out of tricks yet. Shouting a reflexive “Sorry!” he threw the chair leg as hard as he could at worm lady, hitting her square in the chest. 

With a sustained, screeching high note, worm lady toppled back off of the counter. Martin hauled himself into the vent, wincing as the sharpness of the broken metal scraped against him. The man was immediately behind him, swearing under his breath. Martin felt about the same. 

It wasn’t like worm lady was  _ preferable _ to small spaces, but Martin didn’t particularly care for this new development. Especially because he couldn’t see anything and was crawling through a very, very small vent completely blind. 

Something grabbed him by the ankle. He almost screamed, but as he turned, he saw the silhouette of the man, who was frantically waving his free hand. “Quiet!” he hissed, pulling himself a bit farther into the vent. 

Martin didn’t move. The man clearly knew more about what was going on than Martin did. Well, probably. Hopefully. 

Worm lady’s singing picked up again. A few seconds later, she walked past the vent, not seeming to notice the grate on the floor even as she stepped on it. She didn’t look toward the vent. Instead, she just kept walking. 

After another moment’s pause, the man lowered his hand. “Go,” he whispered. 

Martin did. Cold fingers of fear crept along his spine as the metal walls pressed in, in, in, crushing him, killing him, dying in the dark- 

No. Not now. Not yet. Martin could break down later, once he was out of the basement, once he had found Jon, once they had gotten out, once they were both safe. Martin would be fine. He  _ had _ to be. Hell, if worn lady was coping well enough with the holes in her body to decide to stuff them all with maggots, Martin could deal with a slightly tight space for a little while. 

He nearly changed his mind about that when he hit a wall, roughly jarring his head against metal he couldn’t see. “Ow, goddamn-”

“What?” the man said from behind him. “What’s- Are you okay?” 

Martin grimaced and pressed a hand to his head, leaning against one of the walls to rest and sitting up as best he could. “Fine. I’m- I’m fine.” He sighed heavily, closing his eyes against the dark. “Can we… can we stop for a minute?” 

There was a short pause before the man replied. “Yeah. As long as you don’t start screaming or anything, Jane won’t know we’re here.” 

Martin nodded, taking a moment to just breathe. The adrenaline was wearing off, leaving him feeling drained and exhausted. He had no idea how long it had been since everything went to hell. A while. Long enough that he desperately wanted it all to be over with. 

“My name’s Gerry,” the man said, breaking the silence. “Yours?” 

“Martin.” 

There was a small, audible smile in the man’s- Gerry’s voice as he continued. “Well, I would say it’s nice to meet you, but these aren’t exactly the best circumstances.” 

Martin gave a short laugh. “Not really. I would have preferred not going through all of that.” 

“How’d you end up there anyway?” Gerry asked. “You’re from upstairs, right? You don’t look like you’ve been part of the Engine program.” 

“Engine program?” 

“It’s- um, well, a lot of bad shit. It’s what Magnus is trying to do with this place, use patients to make…” Gerry exhaled deeply. “To make a weapon.” 

Martin had a feeling he knew what that meant. The goddess. It had to be. He had no idea how that was possible, how you could  _ make _ something like that, but it wasn’t like anything was making sense anymore. But if that was what was being done here… 

“My- my husband? Is he down here?” Martin blurted, then realized he had to backtrack. “My husband, Jon, he was trying to investigate Magnus and Mount Massive and he got taken. I came here to try and find him; is- is he here?” 

There was a long, long pause. “What’s your last name?” 

“Uh, we- we decided to hyphenate when we got married. We were going to just-“ Martin shook his head, catching himself rambling. “Sorry. It’s Sims-Blackwood. Jonathan Sims-Blackwood. Is he…” 

“He’s… he was down here, yes.” 

“Oh, God. Is he- he’s not- he can’t be-”

“He’s alive.” 

Martin breathed a sigh of relief. “He’s- he’s okay, isn’t he?” 

“I don’t… I’m sorry. I don’t think anyone here is alright, but he got moved upstairs. He’s not in the program anymore, but…” Gerry stopped talking for far, far too long. “My mo- Magnus wanted him for something. I don’t know all the details.” 

Martin felt like the tight, suffocating space of the vent was falling out from under him. Jon might be alive, but… but something had  _ happened _ . Martin knew that Magnus wanted to keep Jon trapped indefinitely in Mount Massive at the very least, but the concept that he’d been  _ used _ , that he’d been forced to somehow make the goddess, forced to create something so terrible… 

“We’ll find him.” Gerry reached over and gently placed his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “I promise. You’re both going to get out of here.” 

Martin wanted to believe him. He didn’t want the doubts and the dread and the hopeless terror to be curling inside of him, pulling away the thought of a happy ending. He just wanted things to be okay. 

But things were never going to be okay if Martin kept just sitting paralyzed, hiding, afraid. The only way things would ever be okay is if Martin  _ did _ something. If he found Jon, if he got them both out. He couldn’t just give up. He had to push through the fear, keep going no matter how hard things got.

For Jon. 

Letting out a shaky breath, Martin reoriented himself. He was exhausted, scared, hurting, but he had to keep going. He felt the wall of the vent he had run into, discovering that it stretched higher than the others. It wasn’t a dead end; the vent was going up. Out of the basement, closer to Jon. 

“Let’s go,” he said, gathering every scrap of courage he could muster, steeling himself against whatever was going to come next, preparing himself to keep going, to not stop until Jon was safe. “I’m going to find my husband.” 


	12. Facsimile

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back! This time I actually have a few chapters written ahead, so hopefully I’ll get back on schedule. Hopefully.

Melanie wasn’t sure exactly how long she’d been unconscious, but things had gotten a hell of a lot worse since she first arrived at the asylum. Which was honestly impressive. She hadn’t thought it could get worse. A lot of people were dead. 

A fucking lot of people. 

“How the hell did any of this happen?” Melanie said as she and Sasha walked cautiously through the male ward. “This- I know there were few murderers and whatever else here, but this… this is  _ insane _ .” 

Sasha just shook her head. “They didn’t make this place to help people.” 

“Well, yeah. But how the hell do you even  _ do _ this? The Hunter, the Twins…” Melanie sighed, leaning against the wall, needing to just stop for a little while. The puncture in her neck was aching like hell and the adrenaline crash was being a bitch. 

“You’re asking me?” 

“You seem to know what’s going on. More than I do, at least.” 

Sasha smiled, leaning her shoulder against the wall. “I’m guessing you’re open to learning.” She nodded at the camera. “About time someone came to investigate.” 

Melanie snorted. “Lot of good that’s done.” 

The two of them were silent for a while. Melanie checked her camera. It was a bit beat up, but not broken. Enough battery life to last until she got out. Hopefully. Maybe she hadn’t gotten any of the staff — live ones, anyhow, but there was plenty of incriminating evidence. And… 

“You know anything about the Priestess?” she asked, unconsciously rubbing her needle wound. 

“Yeah. Her real name’s Jude. I don’t really know what’s she’s talking about — never really been into the whole cult thing — but the doctors pretty much let her have the run of the place. The Goddess thing apparently calms down some of the patients and lessens the staff’s workload.” She scoffed. “Not like they had much of a workload in the first place.” 

“Shit. Screw the human experiments, I might as well sue them for medical negligence.” 

Sasha laughed humorlessly. “Yeah.” 

Melanie shifted uncomfortably, pressing the record button on her camera out of habit. “How’d you end up here? You certainly seem much more put together than everyone else here.” 

“OCD. That’s what it says on my file anyway.” She looked up at the ceiling, resting her head against the wall. “I was in therapy, doing mostly fine. But they used that against me after I came here to see my sister one to many times.” 

“Your sister?” 

“Yeah. She… did some bad things, so they…” Sasha gestured vaguely. “But I… we’ve been together our whole lives. We’re twins. I couldn’t just abandon her.” 

“Do you know where she is?” 

“No.” 

Then there was no way to find her, no way to get her out. “I’m sorry.” 

Shaking her head, Sasha pushed herself off the wall. “Come on. We should keep moving.” 

“I won’t argue with you there.” 

There was no sign of the Hunter as they continued. Small blessings, or something like that. They did come across someone still alive, but he was curled into a ball in a corner and refused to move. Melanie could only tell he was alive from the sounds of him crying. 

The hallway they were walking down appeared to be a residence hall of a sort. Almost all of the doors were open, revealing rundown bedrooms. It gave Melanie a bad feeling. There were so many patients; why would any room be unoccupied, let alone this many? And if there had been people, where had they gone? 

“Ah, here we go,” Sasha said, crouching down and picking up a small metal plaque. “Room 20B.” 

Melanie turned her focus from the empty rooms and looked above the door frames. “Whole hallway has them. Hallway B mean anything to you?” 

Sasha dropped the plaque and got to her feet. “If it’s set up the same as the female wards, then the indoor common area would be at the end, and then showers, storage, infirmary, laundry…” She froze. 

Melanie halted, not daring to move. “What is it?” 

“People behind us. Three or four of them. Don’t know if they’re dangerous, but-“

Melanie looked back. There were, in fact, five people, all men in patient uniforms. They didn’t look mutated, but they certainly didn’t look entirely okay either. All of them were blood spattered. Two had pieces of broken wood they held like clubs, and another had an actual goddamned machete. Why the  _ fuck _ did he have a machete? How the hell was Magnus so goddamned incompetent that not only did they violate every fucking code ever put in place for anything, but they somehow had a  _ machete _ in an asylum? 

“Run,” Melanie said, not taking her eyes off the men. “Now.” 

Sasha didn’t hesitate, Melanie following only a few steps behind. The group behind them started shouting, sprinting, howling. Sasha and Melanie ran, dodging several corpses and pieces of debris that littered the hallway floor. 

Melanie was running. And then she wasn’t. Instead, she was falling. 

She screamed as the floor broke underneath her, whatever poor construction and damage it had sustained finally making it give way. It wasn’t a long fall, only one story down, but Melanie hit hard, wheezing as the impact tore at her broken ribs and sent pain shooting through her legs as she collapsed onto her hands and knees. 

But she didn’t have time to recover. There was just enough light to see the shadow as one of the men dropped down after her, and she barely managed to roll out of the way of his machete. She kicked out, connecting with his ankle and sending him falling. That would normally be good, but of course, Melanie had just enough bad luck that he landed on top of her. She swung her arm up, hitting him in the side of the head with her camera. He yelped and collapsed to the side, giving Melanie the space to get out from under him. 

And just in time. The other three men were coming down, apparently giving up on Sasha and going for what they thought was easier prey. For a moment, Melanie thought of wresting the machete from the man’s hands and cutting all of them down, putting them out of their misery. But she couldn’t do that. She’d done regrettable things in the past, had to do what she needed to defend herself, but this was different. These people were the victims, no matter how violent or terrible they were, and Melanie was damned if she was going to hurt any of them before she’d personally killed whatever sick fuck had made Mount Massive into this. 

So she ran. 

She really fucking hated running. 

“Melanie?” Sasha’s shouts came from somewhere above, muffled but close. “Melanie, where’d you go?” 

There. Door. Melanie crashed through it, thankful it had already been open, and slammed it behind her. She held it as the men pursuing her pounded against it. “Down here,” she called back. “How do I get back up?” 

“Not sure,” Sasha said, sounding both relieved and concerned. “Are you alright?” 

Melanie heard something in the door splinter. “Not really. Where are the stairs?” 

“They should be all the way down, after the laundry- oh, fuck!” Running footsteps from overhead, closely followed by another set of them. 

Melanie took that as her cue. She pushed herself off the ruined door just as one of the men broke through, reaching through the hole and just missing catching onto her jacket. Melanie ran, not really looking where she was going, barreling through so many doors she worried she’d never find the end. There was a terrified wail from above, but it was a man’s voice, not Sasha’s. 

“No! No! Please don-” The begging ended in a gurgling shriek of pain and horror. 

And then Melanie came to the end. There was no door in any of the other walls, nowhere else to run. Melanie slammed the door behind her, frantically scanning for some way to block it. In a stroke of luck the universe seemed content to let her have, there was a cabinet next to the door, heavy enough to form a barricade but light enough that when Melanie jumped up and pulled, it tipped over. Melanie hit the ground hard once again, but the adrenaline at least managed to block out most of the pain. 

Then she found the stairs. At least, what was left of them. Someone had shoved what looked like random pieces of furniture, desks and laundry carts and cots and shelves and other things too smashed to identify. They filled the bottom of the stairwell, completely blocking it off. The barred door that had been there was open, but the debris blocked any way of getting in. If she had time, Melanie could pull enough things out to get in, but most definitely didn’t have the time. There was a dumbwaiter on one wall, but when Melanie tried to open it, the wire doors refused to budge. 

“Sasha?” she shouted as hands began to slam against the entrance door. 

“I’m fine,” Sasha answered. “Guy started following me, but he backed off.” 

“That’s good, ‘cause I’m kind of fucked.” 

“You’re in the laundry room, right?” Sasha said, then there was the sound of objects clattering on the floor. “Can’t see shit up here, but I think that’s where I am.” 

“Yeah.” Melanie winced as the machete stabbed through the door and hands started tearing off splintered pieces. “Any chance there’s a dumbwaiter up there?” She had thirty seconds, maybe a minute tops. There had to be something in the mess of the stairs that could be used as a weapon. 

“Hold on. I think I can-” Sasha stopped abruptly with a sharp, panicked gasp. 

“Sasha!” 

A short pause, then “I’m alright. Startled myself flipping on the lights. You need a lift?” 

Melanie didn’t like this. There was a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, a sense of apprehension that needled through the constant dread and fear that perforated Mount Massive. But Melanie didn’t have any other options. The dumbwaiter dinged and the doors slid open. 

Just as one of the men began to pull his body through the broken door, Melanie sprinted forward and jumped into the dumbwaiter, bending into awkward angles that made her ribs stab at her side. The doors slid shut just in time so the machete slashed against them instead of Melanie’s face. 

The men howled below as Melanie ascended. Then the ride was over, the doors slid open, and Melanie saw Sasha, disheveled but safe. Melanie pulled herself out of the dumbwaiter, taking Sasha’s hand when she offered it. 

“Thank you. I thought…” Melanie trailed off as her eyes drifted over the clutter, all boxes of detergent and soiled clothes and… and… 

Before she had time to react, Melanie’s head was slammed back into the wall, fingers wrapped tightly in her hair, the other hand around her throat. Melanie didn’t look at her attacker. Instead, her gaze was locked on the single body on the floor. Its head was twisted almost backward, its eyes wide and staring, mouth locked in a perpetual scream. But the worst part about the corpse, about the terrified expression, about the blank eyes… Melanie knew them. 

Sasha. Sasha was there, dead on the floor, and Sasha was there, grinning viciously at Melanie as she hit her head against the wall for a second time. 

“What?” Melanie croaked as dizziness swept through her, her legs falling out from beneath her, leaving her held up by the grip on her hair. 

“Oh, darling,” the living Sasha — no,  _ not _ Sasha — crooned, her mouth twisting even more, “didn’t she tell you that we’re identical?” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeahhhh, that major character death warning? I wasn’t kidding about that. Buckle up.


	13. Hollow

Martin didn’t know what was happening, didn’t know where he was. The ventilation system had been bad, but he’d managed with the thought that he’d be out, and then he’d find Jon, and then they’d both be safe. And then he and Gerry had gotten out just in time to come across a mutated women, all muscles and tumors and teeth and screams. Martin didn’t know where Gerry was, didn’t know where he was, didn’t know where Jon was, didn’t know if he was still being chased. All he knew was that he was running. 

He couldn’t keep running forever. He was tired, so tired. He just wanted his husband. He wanted to go home. 

He needed to stop. He needed to find some place to lay low, to rest for a minute. He needed… he needed… 

He stopped. 

He had no clue where he was; everything was doors and halls and rooms he didn’t recognize. But he knew the voice that he could only barely hear, only barely  _ feel _ . The voice he’d been listening to for so many years, the voice he’d fallen in love with, the voice that made him remember why he was walking through hell, why he had to keep going. 

“Jon?” 

So quiet but so close… Martin listened, slowly surveying his surroundings. There. A door. Not open, but maybe… 

Martin knocked on the door. The voice — no, voices, there was more than one person — stopped. “Hello?” he said, a sudden fear rising in his gut. “I- I’m not dangerous or anything. Although, I guess that- that’s probably what all of the crazy murderers say.” He laughed weakly. 

There were so many new things to be scared of, so many new things Martin was just now thinking up. What if this wasn’t Jon? What if it was Jon but whoever was in there wasn’t friendly and what if they hurt him or worse? What if this was just some kind of cruel trick, something else like worm lady or the elevator or the Priestess or Michael and Helen or… or  _ anything _ ? What if this was the goddess and now Martin was going to die a horrible death, and what if the goddess had already gotten to Jon, oh God, what if what if what if- 

The door opened. 

Jon. It was Jon. 

He was the most beautiful thing Martin had ever seen; just Jon being there, alive, okay, he was okay… But he looked like hell. 

There were so many… Martin wasn’t quite sure how many were scars and how many were just open wounds, but Jon had so many holes on his face, his arms, everywhere. Not quite as bad as worm lady, but not  _ normal _ . Not okay. Something had been  _ done _ to him, something horrible… He looked so tired, so worn. His glasses were broken, and clearly he’d lost a good amount of weight because he was so, so thin and his face was the same face Martin had fallen in love with but now it was gaunt and hollow and-

And… 

“Oh, God,” Martin whispered, all but lunging forward to pull Jon into his arms. “Oh, God, Jon, what did they do to you, what did they… God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I should have- should have been here, I’m so, so sorry-” 

Jon put his hands on Martin’s shoulders and gently pushed himself away. He said nothing for a moment, just stared, and his eyes were so blank, so confused… 

“I- I’m sorry,” Jon said. “I’m not- I don’t…” 

Martin could feel the cracking in his voice, not quite crying but coming close. “Jon, it’s- it’s me. I’m here.” 

“I… I don’t…” 

“Archivist.” 

Martin jumped, startled by the new voice. There was another person in the room, a woman that Martin didn’t recognize, holding a flashlight and wearing a headscarf and not wearing a uniform, not a patient or doctor or anything. So why was she here, what was she doing, what was going on? 

“I get it’s kind of pointless to ask if you know this guy,” the woman said, “but do you have any idea who this is?” 

Martin couldn’t help but laugh near-hysterically. “ _ Know him _ ? I’m his husband!” 

The woman’s brow furrowed in slight suspicion and Jon continued to look confused. 

“I know- I know I should have been here sooner,” Martin continued frantically, a horrible sensation tearing through his chest and settling deep in his stomach. “I didn’t- There was this- this thing, I don’t know what it was, and I got stuck in this basement and some lady tried to  _ eat _ me, I tried to find you as soon as I could but- but I… I…” He felt himself swaying, felt the way his lungs were constricting and he couldn’t breathe and this  _ wasn’t supposed to be how this went _ . “I’m so sorry…” 

Jon reached out, took Martin’s left hand, lifted it slightly, brushed his thumb over the wedding ring. “I’m sorry,” he said again, dropping Martin’s hand. “I don’t know if I am.” 

The woman cleared her throat. “Mind if we have this conversation inside?” 

She still looked suspicious, but Martin couldn’t think about the meaning of that. Not right now. He just stepped in through the doorway, closed the door behind him, leaned against it and slid down to the floor. He felt like he was in the elevator all over again, but this time it was worse; this time he wasn’t sure if he had anything waiting for him on the other side. 

“Not exactly the best time to talk about a divorce,” he mumbled humorlessly. 

“No, that isn’t…” Jon sighed, crouching down and restlessly adjusting his glasses. “I can’t- I don’t… I don’t know who you are. I don’t know who  _ I _ am.” 

And Martin realized. They hadn’t just carved into his body, and they hadn’t just carved into his mind either. They had  _ taken it _ . 

Martin felt something break. He’d say it was his heart (he’d always been sentimental) but it was something deeper, something worse. The person he was, no, the person he  _ had been _ . The person he had been before the asylum, before Jon disappeared, before before before. Back when he wasn’t so scared, so desperate, and losing every semblance of hope. That person was gone, had been killed by this place. Martin wasn’t sure who was left. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon said, but he didn’t seem to know what he was sorry  _ for _ . 

“Yeah. So am I.” 

If only Martin had been a little stronger, a little faster, a little  _ better _ … But he wasn’t. 

The woman stepped forward to join in, forming a circle of battered, broken people. She didn’t seem injured, sure, and she had her memories, but there was something there. She wasn’t suspicious anymore. She looked between Jon and Martin, a thin expression of understanding on her face. She’d lost just as much, but whatever she was missing, it wasn’t  _ gone _ . Not entirely. Not yet. 

“Basira.” She sat down, legs crossed and face impassive once again. “And you are?” 

“Martin.” 

Jon was silent. There was a look on his face Martin couldn’t read. Sadness? Confusion? A mix of the two? 

Basira let the moment hang in the air. She breathed deeply, closing her eyes. She understood, but that didn’t make anything better. If anything, it made things worse. Martin felt more of the clawing emptiness, and as much as she was trying to hide it, Basira was afraid. Not fear for life; fear for someone else, fear for her _ self _ . 

She opened her eyes. “Right. Well, considering you haven’t tried to tear us to pieces, I’m going to assume you’re on our side and relatively sane.” 

Her long pause meant Martin was supposed to respond. It took him a while to form the words, and when he did, his voice came flat and distant. Calm, because he couldn’t even be scared anymore. “Yeah. I’m from the administrative ward. Checked myself in to… to find…” 

“To find your husband?” Jon asked, sounding haggard, voice rough in the way it only got when he was grieving something he couldn’t ever fix. 

Martin couldn’t answer. He just nodded. 

Basira smiled thinly, a combination of wry humor and an attempt at reassurance. “That’s good.” She got to her feet, walked to the desk in the center of the room and brought back a stack of papers, which she dropped on the floor in the center of their circle. “How about we compare notes?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would apologize, but... nah


	14. Plummeting

“Ugh, son of a bitch!” 

Well, Gerry wasn’t wrong. He was, most definitely, the son of a bitch. When the hell had Mary shut off his keycard?  _ Why _ the hell had she shut it off? He’d only stumbled across one of his old ones by accident after he and Martin had gotten separated. They’d confiscated his active ones and shoved him into the fucking Engine, which would have scrambled his brain even more if the power hadn’t gone out. On that note, the place was going into meltdown, so shutting off keycards Gerry didn’t even  _ have _ was entirely ridiculous. 

He tossed the keycard on the ground. Not like he needed it. 

Okay. This was fine. He could handle this. Going the way he’d been planning wouldn’t work, but there had to be another way. He and Martin had gotten separated between the male wards and admin block, and Gerry had gone toward admin, but apparently some asshole had locked the door between the patient section and the lobby and he was stuck unless he could find another key card. Which was doable, but he didn’t have the time. So he’d have to go back and hope that the connection between the lobby and female wards was open, but that would take too long, not to mention the time he’d spend either stealing a car or walking down the road. Every second wasted was another second someone could die, another person dead because of him if he didn’t get out- 

Or maybe he didn’t have to. 

While there wasn’t a way to get down to the lobby — the only way out unless he wanted to break all his limbs jumping out a window or impale himself on barbed wire climbing the fence — there was a room in the administrative block that was always accessible. It served as a surveillance hub and watchtower, looking out over the recreational yards in the back, but more importantly, it housed the emergency radio. 

It was easier to navigate now that Gerry’s head wasn’t quite as fuzzy. Being farther from the Engine was doing wonders for his headaches, but the occasional pulses of pain and inkblots made sure he remembered that the Walrider was still floating around. On the bright side, he had an early warning system. On the less bright side, being reminded of the swarming cloud of death that probably wanted to kill him personally wasn’t exactly ideal. 

That little thought distracted him enough that when there was a voice from behind him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. 

“Ooh, look who it is!” 

The jumpy adrenaline turned into a cold chill that crept down Gerry’s spine. He knew that voice, and the voice that always came with it. 

He inhaled slowly, turning to face them. “Michael. Helen.” 

“Gerard Keay,” Michael said, tilting his head with heavy disappointment in his voice. “I thought you’d be happy to see us.” 

“There’s no reason to be scared,” Helen added. “We’re not going to kill you. That would spoil all the fun.” 

Gerry looked at them. Organs, eyes, skin… the Engine took it all. Maybe there were worse cases — Trevor with his cancer, Daisy Tonner with her extreme mutations, Jonathan Sims-Blackwood with what had almost happened to him and then what  _ did _ — but Michael and Helen hadn’t fared well. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, because that was all he could say. 

“No apologies.” Helen almost snapped the words. 

“Those aren’t worth much anymore,” Michael added. 

“I know. I… I’m… I’m going to try to make things better.” 

Michael turned the corners of his ruined mouth up in a grin. “Good luck with that.”

Helen put a hand on Gerry’s shoulder, and he forced himself not to recoil. She deserved at least that much. “Mind your mother.” 

Gerry nodded, unable to think of any way to respond. 

And as suddenly as they appeared, Helen and Michael vanished. Gerry hesitated, wanting so badly to do something,  _ anything _ that would alleviate the guilt. Helen and Michael weren’t innocent. Had they not been declared legally insane before their trial, they would have faced life in prison if not the death penalty. They’d murdered people. 

But they didn’t deserve this. They deserved better. All of these people deserved so much  _ fucking  _ better…

“We’re all angry,” Gerry mumbled, grounding himself in the present and what he needed to do to make things right. “We’re all angry.” 

He kept going.

There wasn’t anyone in the upper parts of the administrative block near the radio tower. There was blood on the walls and claw marks on the floor, but no people, alive or dead. Gerry supposed that was good, but he couldn’t help the prickling at the back of his neck and the dread coiling deep in his gut as he walked up the long set of stairs to the tower. He moved through the short hallway at the top, scanning for any signs of danger. Nothing. He reached the end, put his hand on the doorknob. Opened it. 

Nothing. Nothing but computer screens and various equipment and the radio. The radio. Gerry felt his breath catch as he shut the door and lunged for the radio, turning the dial and leaning close over the microphone. Mostly static as he flipped through the channels, but then he found it. 

The police radio channel was quiet, cut through with short bursts of chatter. Gerry knew the police were corrupt as all hell, but maybe… Gerry was technically an employee, so he’d have the credibility. Mention the breakout and injuries and deaths of the scientists and staff, and the police would have to call emergency medical, get ambulances on the scene, because if any of the wrong Magnus people ended up dying there’d be hell to pay. And with EMTs came good people, people that weren’t in on the cover-up, people that would help the patients just as much as everyone else-

He was getting ahead of himself. One thing at a time. He pressed the talk button on the microphone. “Hello?” 

A pause, then someone on the other end: “Hello? Who is this?” 

“My name is Gerard Keay, I’m at the Mount Massive Asylum, there’s been-” 

Too many things happened at once. The door opened, and then Gerry felt someone grab him by the hair and slam his head into the counter. The person on the radio said something, asking if he was alright, sir are you alright? He stumbled, dazed, fell back… 

And heard his mother’s voice. 

“Yes, he’s fine. I apologize for my son’s behavior; he’s been on a rebellious streak lately. Ah, I almost forgot — this is Mary Keay. Everything is fine here, thank you. Everything is under control.” 

“Copy that, ma’am.” 

Gerry tried to push himself back up and staggered, supporting himself halfway up when he ran into the wall. He gaped at Mary, who calmly picked up the radio, raised it above her head, and shattered it to pieces on the floor. “Why… Why would you…” 

There was madness in her eyes now, a manic grin across her face. “We don’t  _ need _ help, Gerard. The situation is under control.” 

“You’re… you’re out of your fucking mind- under control? What fucking part of this is under control?” Gerry pressed his palm to his head, futilely trying to stop the pulsing pain and the dizziness. 

“Don’t talk to your mother that way,” she snapped, stepping forward toward him. 

Gerry couldn’t help but laugh. “You put me in the Engine,  _ mom _ . You don’t have the right-”

“Don’t you understand?” Mary growled, dangerously close now. “I’m doing all of this for you! I created everything, made all of this for you! Project Walrider was supposed to be my legacy, something for you to take when I’m gone. We could have done so many things, so many wonderful things…” 

“I didn’t want this. I never wanted this.” 

She looked at him incredulously, then glared. “You’re too young. Too naïve.” She softened, laid her hands on his shoulders. “I love you, Gerard. I know I’ve hurt you, but I can’t let you destroy your own future.” 

Gerry felt that horrible swell of guilt, the shame of disappointing his mother. Even if she was misguided, she was honest. She’d done all of this for him. She loved him. And as much as he hated it, as much as he knew it was wrong, Gerry loved her too. She was his mother. He was her son. 

Except he wasn’t. Her son was  _ Gerard _ , her own projection of what she wanted him to be. The one she wanted to shape, to make into a reflection of herself. He wasn’t Gerard. He was Gerry. It was on her that she’d never noticed, that she’d never cared. 

He pushed himself up, knocking her hands away. The pain in his head was receding, ghosts of the inkblots dancing briefly over his vision. “I’m leaving, and you’re not going to stop me.” 

“Oh, isn’t this just so touching?” a mocking voice called from the doorway. 

Julia. Trevor stood next to her, the two of them blocking off the only exit that didn’t involve smashing out a window and falling sixty feet to the ground. 

“I’ll take the bitch,” Trevor growled, eyes set on Mary. “You take her kid.” 

Julia grinned ferociously. “Gladly.” 

Gerry barely had time to get out an exhuasted “oh, shit” before it all went to hell. Trevor went for Mary, but Julia charged straight at Gerry. She didn’t have her knife anymore, but he knew she was far stronger than him. He sidestepped her, catching a sharp blow to the side when she noticed what he was doing. He shouted in pain, feeling something crack, but he took off running. 

He’d almost made it to the stairs at the end of the hallway when Julia caught up to him. She drove her shoulder into his back and tackled him to the ground. Before he even had enough time to comprehend what was happening, she’d wrapped an arm around his throat and started to squeeze. In a panic, he threw his head back and connected with something, making her howl in pain and release him just enough that he could slip away. 

He got a few more steps before she was on him again, nearly tearing his right arm out of its socket when she grabbed it and pulled him back. They were close to the stairs, only a few feet away, but Gerry knew he didn’t have a chance of reaching them. Julia threw him down to the floor, but he had just enough time to roll and get his knees up as she lunged, holding her back. She clawed for his throat and he desperately tried to keep her hands away with his own. 

“Please,” he tried as they grappled, her superior strength quickly draining away whatever advantage he might have had. “I don’t want to fight you.” 

“Too fucking bad,” she spat, then reached back and dug her fingers into the slash on Gerry’s leg. 

Gerry gasped at the sudden pain in the injury he’d almost forgotten he had, his legs collapsing from under Julia as she reached for his neck again. He managed to buck his hips and roll, getting her off of him. He scrambled for the stairs, not even thinking of what he was doing but just knowing he had to get away. She screeched as she leapt on him again, slamming him down onto his side and hitting him roughly in the jaw with a fist. He was dazed long enough that she was on him, and then everything blurred into pain and tangling limbs as she tried to kill him and he tried to escape. 

In the frenzy, neither of them noticed the direction their melee was taking them. 

Julia had her hands firmly locked around Gerry’s neck, thumbs digging into his windpipe. He got his arms in between hers and pulled them apart, relieving some of the pressure and giving himself half a breath as her fingernails dug in hard enough to draw blood. He shoved his hands against the bottom of her jaw, pushing her up and away as she snarled and tried to regain her stranglehold. Gerry shifted his weight underneath her, trying to get to one side so maybe he could get out from where she was straddling him. She adjusted her own stance, putting all of her own weight on one side to force him back down. 

They both noticed when her leg didn’t hit the floor. 

Julia’s remaining eye widened. Gerry’s next frantic inhale came as more of a gasp. They stared at each other in that frozen moment of time. His grip faltered as hers tightened. Her eye narrowed again. The message was clear: she was taking him with her. 

Together, they fell down the stairs. Gerry felt himself hit hard edges, felt bones break but wasn’t sure if they were Julia’s or his. He just knew it hurt. 

Hell of a way to die, he thought as he closed his eyes. Everything he’d been through only to be killed by a set of fucking stairs. He had a strange sense of calm through the pain. Resignation. This wasn’t so bad. Not so bad at all. 

Then his head slammed into concrete and the dark behind his eyelids became an explosion of light, cut through with flashes of inkblots that faded into black, empty nothing. 


	15. Pinboard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jshdjdhsh sorry for the wait y’all I’m trying my best

“Why would they  _ make _ something like that?” 

Basira raised her eyebrows at Martin’s question. “It’s a weapon.” 

The Archivist looked up from the paper he’d been looking over. “Like a chemical weapon? One that does…” He gestured at his scar-covered face. 

“I don’t think so. Those seem to be undesirable side effects.” She jabbed an emphatic finger at some of the notes she’d read. “They’re trying to do… something else.” 

“The goddess,” Martin said, shuddering. “She… it… it’s bad.” 

“Bad how?” 

“ _ Bad _ .” He paused, continuing hesitantly when he realized he had to. “It’s… some sort of…  _ thing _ . I don’t know what it is, but… it tore a guy in half.” 

“The Hunter?” 

Martin looked at her blankly. “Who? No, it- it was… invisible. Mostly. Except then it was there, and I saw it, and…” He shut down, shaking his head rapidly. 

The Archivist smiled wryly. “Sounds like a hell of a weapon.” 

“And you’re sure this wasn’t some sort of hallucination?” Basira asked. 

Martin glared venomously. “I’m not crazy. I fucking know what I saw. Some sort of invisible monster, this lady filled with worms that tried to  _ eat me _ , these two people that were all wrong, and… and…” He briefly looked at the Archivist before turning his gaze back down. 

“The Twins?” the Archivist suggested. “With the… fingers?” 

Martin nodded but said nothing. 

“Someone’s been playing us,” the Archivist said, turning to Basira. “You know more than I do.” 

“Mary Keay. She runs this place.” She shuffled through her papers and pointed at a heading. “She’s involved one something called the Morphogenic Engine Program. And…”

Basira trailed off. She needed to think. She stood, stepped off to the side, closed her eyes. Put it all together. Think. Analyze. Understand. Focus.

There were the mutations. What she had seen in the female ward, the Twins, Dai- no, the Hunter. Not Daisy. The Hunter. Clearly more severe, mentioned as an unwanted side effect of the Morphogenic Engine. Some part of it caused tumors and uncontrolled growth of rogue cells; sometimes they manifested as abscesses and disproportainalized limbs, sometimes as severe teratomas, sometimes as less noticeable malignant cancers. The files brushed over the brain damage aspects, but they were undoubtedly there. Basira had gone through countless patient overviews before she arrived at Mount Massive, and the vast majority had been institutionalized for non-violent reactions to mental illness. 

But the Magnus Corporation didn’t care about the patients. They had a near infinite supply; they accepted more patients than any other institution and had all the right authorities in their pockets. Even if someone noticed, it would be easy enough to make them disappear. Like what they’d tried to do to Basira. Like what they’d done to Daisy. 

Project Walrider was a weapon. The malignancy of the Morphogenic Engine wasn’t what they wanted, and neither were the individuals that ended up somewhat enhanced. Basira hadn’t found the Hunter’s file (and she wasn’t Daisy, she  _ wasn’t _ ) but there were others. Loss of pain centers, increased strength and aggression, inhibition decreased so significantly that the patients would simply try to murder any person in sight… The files had made notes of those, but those patients had been similarly discarded. The physical effects of the Project weren’t the goal. Something else was. 

“Ah, um, Martin?” the Archivist said, sounding almost timid. “What did you- what did you say your husband’s name was again?”

“Jon.” 

“And… the last name?”

“Sims-Blackwood.” 

Basira looked back at the Archivist, curiosity piqued. “You found the file.” 

The Archivist nodded and tried to hand the paper to Martin. Martin just shook his head. “I- I can’t read it. Just tell me what it says.” 

Basira released the coiled tension she hadn’t realized she’d been holding onto. She understood Martin, more than she wanted to admit to herself. She knew those feelings. She held them in the folded paper she’d tucked into her pocket, the one with Daisy’s name on it. She couldn’t read it, not until there was no other choice. She was going to find Daisy, and there wasn’t going to be anything wrong with her. Basira had to believe that. Had to, or else she wouldn’t be able to see this through. 

The Archivist blinked down at the paper, reflexively pushing up his glasses. “I…” 

Gently, Basira took the file from him and sat back down. It was covered with lines and lines of black — apparently too sensitive even for paper files that weren’t brought out of the facility. Redactions, secrets… Mary Keay was nothing if not paranoid. But bolded and centered at the top of the paper was a name: Jonathan Sims-Blackwood. 

It was difficult to glean much from what wasn’t censored, but it was enough. Sims-Blackwood was involved in Project Walrider and was apparently one of the few who had positive results to the Morphogenic Engine. Integumentary tissue degradation and acute emotional distress, but nothing else. He retained full mental capacity. The Engine didn’t eat away at his brain. And then, near the end… 

‘Patient was responsive to [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] recommended he be transferred to becoming a full [REDACTED] for Project Walrider due to the potential for physical decline noted in A. Montague. Dr. Keay attempted to integrate him, but the efforts were met with extreme resistance, which culminated in threats and actions suggesting that the patient would self-terminate before submitting to [REDACTED]. Out of concern of losing the patient, Dr. Keay consulted Dr. [REDACTED], who concluded that integration may be possible if the mental resistance was eliminated. Dr. [REDACTED] proceeded to [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] the patient, which has appeared to effectively remove most of the patient’s conscious memory to induce a possible acceptance of [REDACTED] due to being unaware of both his life prior to internment and his rejection of Project Walrider. Patient is now interred in the prison block and should be monitored closely for any significant knowledge pertaining to his own identity or the status of Project Walrider. Further tests pending.’ 

Fuck. And Basira thought  _ she  _ could be clinical. 

She cleared her throat awkwardly, pushing through the low buzz of fear (could Keay have done that to Daisy? To  _ Basira _ ?) to get the information out. “Well, Archivist, it looks like you have a name.” 

“Shit. How bad is it?” 

She folded the paper and put it into her pocket along with the other one. “Apparently whatever they were trying to do with you for Project Walrider was bad enough that they messed with your brain to stop you from ‘self-terminating.’” Basira all but spat the last words, disgusted at saying them aloud. 

Martin made a low moaning noise, burying his face in his hands. “Fucking… Jesus  _ Christ _ .” 

The Archivist — Jon? — was staring down at his hand, intently twisting his wedding ring around his finger. “They… How? Why?” He jumped to his feet suddenly enough to startle Martin out of his stupor. “Why the  _ fuck _ \- How could they just  _ do  _ that?” 

“I don’t know,” Basira said. “This is… so much worse than I thought it would be.” 

The whole affair hadn’t started simple, exactly, but it was nothing like this. Corrupt police, shady corporations, unethical practices and illegal secrecy… She felt like she was losing her mind. She’d come to find Daisy, and now… Basira almost couldn’t comprehend the dichotomy. She was confused and uninformed and  _ scared _ … This wasn’t how things were supposed to work. It just  _ wasn’t _ . 

The room fell back into near-silence, quiet enough to her Martin’s despairing whisper: “I just want to go home.” 

Basira almost lost sight of it all in that moment. She was fraying, grasping for stable ground that was no longer there. But she didn’t let herself fall into it. Everything going on was overwhelming, but there were answers. There were always answers, and just because Basira couldn’t find them right now didn’t mean that she could just give up. She had to find Daisy. But before that, she had another job to do. She may have resigned, but she was still an officer, and her duty was to keep civilians safe. 

As comfortingly as she could, she said “I’m going to try to get you there. Archivist- um, Jon?” 

“Jon is… Jon is fine.” If it was possible, he looked more shaken than he already had been once he said his name out loud. 

“Jon, then. You said you knew your way around this place?” 

“Kind of.” He sighed, shaking his head. “There have to be other exits somewhere, but the only one I know of is the front doors. We aren’t too far, but with the Hunter and whatever Project Walrider is, not to mention anything else we haven’t seen…” 

“But it’s the best chance of getting out of here, right?” 

“Well…” Martin said, pushing himself to his feet. “There’s a lot of people in the administrative block that might not want us to get out.” 

“We can work with that. The administrative block is big enough to avoid anyone that’s there.” 

“It’s better than waiting here.” Jon’s face suddenly twitched and his eyes widened in alarm. “We need to leave. Now.” 

Basira could feel it too, whatever it was. Cold fingers prodded at her spine, and for just a moment she almost thought her heart had stopped. It was as if someone was standing behind her, and in front of her, and on all sides, waiting for just the right time to strike.

Jon inhaled shakily and looked up at one corner of the room. And then, almost too quietly to be heard: “It’s here…” 

That was enough to launch Basira into motion. She lunged for the door and unlocked it, throwing it open with enough force that she heard the doorknob put a hole in the wall. “Move!” 

Jon and Martin didn’t need any prompting. They ran for it, Basira moving to follow them. Out of the corner of her eye, so faint she couldn’t be sure it was actually there, she thought she saw the outline of a humanoid shape hovering just behind her, glowing dimly and illuminating vicious claws and a face and a mouth open in an anguished, furious scream. 

Basira ran as fast as she ever had in her life. Maybe she was going crazy, maybe it was a trick of the light, but she knew that if whatever she had seen caught up with her she wouldn’t stand a chance. A deafening shriek filled her ears as she sprinted down seemingly endless corridors, up and down sets of stairs, hoping desperately that Jon really did know where he was going. 

By the time they reached the administrative block, the thing had stopped following. Basira’s ears still rang and when she stopped running, she could see her hands shaking violently. She was  _ scared _ , and this time, she couldn’t reason her way out of it. That thing — Project Walrider, it had to be — wasn’t possible, but it had been there. It had  _ been _ there. Either Basira was going insane or something like that was real. She wasn’t quite certain which was worse. 

Basira took a moment to survey their surroundings. They were somewhere in one of the areas for employees, with offices lining the hallway on the floor they were on, and some sort of break room a floor below them, a sturdy wooden railing in place of a wall on that side. Martin supported himself against the railing, wincing and holding the wound on his shoulder as blood trickled out from under his fingers. Jon was staggering in blind, confused circles. He muttered something incomprehensible, then collapsed flat on the floor. 

“Jon!” Martin shouted as both he and Basira rushed to help. 

“Hurts…” Jon mumbled, face contorted with pain as he pressed a hand to his head. “ _ Hurts _ …” 

“What’s wrong with him?” Martin snapped, hysteria rising in his voice. 

Basira would have said something in reply, but she was interrupted by another voice from behind her. “Oh, he’ll be fine.” 

Basira whirled to see the grinning faces of the Twins, leering down at the three of them. “What do you think, Michael?” the woman asked. 

“Hmm, not yet, Helen,” the man, Michael replied, grin widening. “I think I may have the perfect idea.” He bent to whisper something into Helen’s ear, and they shared an eerily synchronized laugh. 

“We’re not playing games anymore,” Basira said, glowering. “I suggest you leave before something bad happens.” 

Helen, despite her nigh-unreadable, mangled face, managed to look offended. “No need to threaten us. We won’t hurt you.” 

“No, not at all,” Michael added. “We’re not allowed. Except… Jude never said anything about her, did she?” 

“I don’t think she did. After all, it will only take one, and she doesn’t look like she’d work. Acceptable loss, I say.” 

“Very much so.” 

What happened next was too fast for Basira to process. With how distorted the Twins’ bodies were, they shouldn’t have the speed or strength they did. Michael took Martin by the wrist and up and away from Jon. Before Basira had a chance to react, Helen had leapt forward, grabbing Basira by the upper arms and lifting her fully off the ground. Basira dropped her weight and kicked out with her legs, but Helen managed to pivot and shove her back before anything could connect. 

As Basira’s back slammed against the railing and the force took her falling over the edge, she caught a glimpse of Helen, cheerily waving and grinning impossibly wide. 


	16. Infirmary

Melanie was so,  _ so _ fucked. This was  _ bad _ . This person, this…. Not-Sasha… she’d already killed her twin, and Melanie knew that it was going to get a whole lot worse. 

It didn’t help that Not-Sasha had a friend. 

As Not-Sasha released Melanie’s throat and let her drop, Melanie pushed through her daze to grab her camera. She swung up at the arm still gripping her hair, connecting hard enough to produce a crunch and a pained howl. Melanie shoved Not-Sasha away and staggered forward, all but dragging herself across the floor, hobbled by her pounding head and stabbing ribs and the horrible, desperate exhaustion. 

She didn’t make it far. Someone else grabbed her sharply by the collar of her jacket, picking her up and slamming her back into the floor before she had time to react. Melanie felt something in her nose break as blood began to flow across her face, into her mouth, down her throat. She coughed and spluttered, stunned for long enough for this new person to pluck the camera out of her hand and haul her up by the hair. 

“That’s very good, Jared,” Not-Sasha said, circling around to Melanie’s front and holding one wrist with a scowl. “And that wasn’t very nice of you, darling, not very nice at all.”

“Fuck you,” Melanie gurgled, spitting blood and what looked like a tooth onto the floor. 

Not-Sasha ignored her, choosing to address Jared with a snap of her fingers. “Get her into a chair. I want to spend some quality time with her.” 

Jared made a grunting noise in response, paused a moment, and gave a vicious kick to Melanie’s ribs. Melanie screamed in strangled agony; whatever bones hadn’t already been broken sure as hell were now. For a minute or two, she blacked in and out of consciousness, struggling to breathe through the pain and blood. 

When she woke up fully, she almost wished she hadn’t. 

She was in a wheelchair, the kind with restraints that she supposed were normal for a place like Mount Massive Asylum. Her wrists and ankles were strapped in place and her head was hanging over her chest, blood from her broken nose dripping onto her lap. She lifted her head slowly, still struggling to breathe. She was in a new room, most likely part of the infirmary, all dirty concrete-block walls and grimy tiled floors. Not-Sasha stood in front of her, leaning against a rusty industrial sink with a wicked grin. A hulking man she assumed had to be Jared stood beside her, massive burst abscesses leaking blood and pus from every piece of exposed skin making him look more like a corpse than a living person. 

Not-Sasha pushed herself off the sink, reaching behind her and producing Melanie’s camera. “Making a movie about this place, were you? Well, if that’s what’s happening, I might as well give you a hell of a show, hm?” She handed the camera to Jared. “Hold this for me, will you, dear?” 

Jared leered, exposing the severed remnant of what used to be his tongue. 

Not-Sasha stalked toward Melanie, pulling a medical cart from underneath the sink along with her. “Let’s have some fun.” 

Melanie bared her teeth in a furious growl, trying and failing to quash the terror rising in her chest. Fuck, this was bad. This was very, very bad. Of course the shitheads at Magnus couldn’t just evac their patients to a hospital like any normal institution, no, they had to do enough medical procedures that it somehow warranted goddamn  _ bone shears _ . 

Not-Sasha leaned in close, gently brushing Melanie’s hair from her forehead. “My, my, Jared certainly did a number to that face of yours, didn’t he? Pity, really.” A flash of metal and Not-Sasha had a knife up to Melanie’s face, the point not even an inch from one eye. “I could fix it for you. It’ll hurt, but as long as you don’t move too much…” 

She paused, circling around behind Melanie. Melanie focused on breathing. Inhale, exhale. Don’t think about anything. She twitched one hand, flexing the fingers. The cuff was loose, but not quite loose enough to fit her hand through. Maybe she could work it, as long as she could keep Not-Sasha talking. 

“Your sister wanted to help you. I can help you, too. We make a break for it-” 

“Oh, no no no no. No, I think I’ll stay here. The Hunter doesn’t bother me, my sister can’t pester me, that Priestess knows not to fuck with me. I have her goddess more than she ever will.” 

Melanie swallowed thickly, tasting blood as Not-Sasha ran her fingers down the back of her neck. Still not enough room to get her hand free, but if she could just twist it a little more… “The goddess isn’t real. The doctors, the corporation — they’re responsible for what’s happening here.” 

“They aren’t the goddess, darling. Their Walrider is nothing but a symbol, a representation of an enigma. We made the Walrider. We  _ are _ the goddess.” She scraped her fingernails across Melanie’s scalp, making needles poke down her spine. “Here, let me show you.” 

Melanie didn’t feel the knife until she felt bone crumble beneath it. Bile rose in her throat as she instinctively glanced at the knife stabbed into the arm of the wheelchair. Stabbed  _ through _ her right pinky finger, dead appendage falling onto the floor, and blood, so much  _ fucking blood _ -

Not-Sasha’s gleeful, hysterical cackle was just loud enough that Melanie could hear it over her own screaming. Her vision swam, blurring red and dirty white and shiny gray, oh fuck oh fuck oh  _ fuck _ \- 

The feeling of something tightening, something sharp and dull at the same time, and then a crunch that resonated through Melanie’s bones. Her shriek trailed into a horrid, wet gasp. She knew she was crying, didn’t care, could only see Not-Sasha in front of her brandishing bone shears and a severed lump of flesh that she tossed haphazardly to the floor. A small movement and she’d swapped the shears for a scalpel and was leaning close, looking intently at Melanie’s eyes, doubtless trying to decide which one to gouge out first. 

Another scream that Melanie realized wasn’t hers. Not-Sasha jerked back, cursing and grimacing, saying something, gesturing, leaving… Melanie felt her head loll onto one shoulder and her eyes moved to her hand, what was left of it. Her ring finger was gone too, the stump of it leaking blood. Melanie’s stomach lurched and her guts heaved, but all she did was spit clotted blood still running down from her nose. She was dizzy, tired, she was just going to rest for a little bit… 

Another fresh jolt of pain brought with it the clarity of adrenaline. Melanie felt her pupils constrict and saw her vision clear, body tensing. Not going to die yet. No, no, her teeth were buzzing and her lungs were squeezing and hell, her hand was smaller now, and Not-Sasha had been polite and left all her supplies behind. 

With a shriek not of pain but of fury, Melanie wrenched her injured hand out of the cuff, struggled with the buckle holding the other, noticed Jared making a tongueless, animal noise and charging. 

“Motherfucker!” Melanie screamed, pulling her other hand free and reaching for the cart, grabbing the first implement she could find. 

Jared’s charge pushed the wheelchair backward, slamming Melanie’s back into the wall and making her stab the bone shears into his gut even harder. He recoiled, stunned, and Melanie gave another battle cry and pulled out the shears, stabbed again. He fell to the ground but that didn’t stop her from lunging on top of him, stabbing down again and again and again. 

She only stopped when she saw a grainy flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, tearing her focus away from the now very dead Jared. Her mangled hand pulsed and she dropped the bone shears, good hand clenching into a fist and pressing it to her mouth to stifle another scream. There was nothing there, but there had been. There  _ had been _ , hadn’t there? A silhouette, a person, a new target…

Melanie leaned to the side and wretched until she managed to vomit, her nose burning dully from the bile and the movement. When she was done, she straightened, wiped her mouth with the back of her whole hand, looked down at the crippled one. 

“Fuck me,” she groaned, rolling off of Jared’s bloody body and flipping the wheelchair onto its side. 

A minute or so of fumbling later and she was free. Her head was spinning and she kept seeing  _ something _ just beyond the edge of her vision. She pushed herself up to unsteady feet, shrugging off her jacket. She supported herself against the sink as she dropped the jacket to the floor, held it down with her foot, and tore off a sleeve with a good deal of difficulty. Carefully, she wrapped it over her new stumps, tying it off in an attempt to staunch the bleeding. God, so much blood… 

No time for that. She was getting the hell out of here. 

Almost as an afterthought, her gaze drifted to the corner of the sink. Jared had apparently put the camera down before he attacked her, and aside from a crack on the casing it looked almost completely undamaged. Might as well keep what she came for in the first place, she figured as she checked to make sure it was on and nestled it in her bad hand, holding it against her body. She could probably use the night vision on it, and the damn thing could keep running for a month with its high-strength batteries. 

She crept out of the room, realizing she had no clue where she was. Even if she hadn’t been only half-conscious, she hadn’t gone through this part. It was the infirmary, clearly, but as for how to get out… 

“Oh, shit.” 

She wasn’t the only one. She’d emerged into a room full of gurneys, at least a dozen of them filled. It was hard to see in the dim light, but it looked like all of them had pieces missing. The person on the nearest gurney, breathing shallowly and barely alive, had no eyes. Their mouth hung open, revealing broken remnants of teeth and a severed tongue, blood languidly bubbling from what was left. 

Melanie knew how she should handle this. Escape, get out, show the world the evidence.  _ This _ wasn’t supposed to be her problem. She was injured, beaten. She should get out while she had the chance. 

But all the years of schoolyard fights, all the bloody noses and bruised knuckles, all the clenched fists and bared teeth and adrenaline highs… Melanie could be the bigger person. The better person. A  _ good _ person. She could, and maybe she was, but not now. Not now, said the pain in her hand and the sharpness in her blood. Not now, the sightless, mute, and mutilated person before her would say if they were able to. 

Not now, said the shrouded figure made of dark that hovered in the corner of her eye, claws running down her spine and across her brain, whispering a mantra of violence and hatred and  _ hurt _ . 

She went back and grabbed a knife. 

She wasn’t steady on her feet. Her hand and face were throbbing; her ribs felt like they were stabbing into her. But that wasn’t going to stop her. Not-Sasha was going to have to try a lot harder. 

Melanie walked past the gurneys and the mangled bodies, shouldering open the door at the other side of the room. It led into a kind of hallway, with what looked like an operating room on one side and a locker room in another. A faint dripping sound came from the operating room, accompanied by the metallic smell of blood. Recent, probably whoever had distracted Not-Sasha. She was close. 

Melanie wasn’t sure if it was instinct or a sixth sense, but she managed to turn and deflect the scalpel just before it stabbed into her back. 

She grinned wildly as she saw Not-Sasha’s bewilderment, the moment of surprise before she recovered. “Didn’t expect me, did you?” 

Not-Sasha reacted quickly, swatting at Melanie’s injured hand as she drew back, dropping into a better stance and readying her scalpel. Melanie screamed, but the pain was already beginning to drain away as the adrenaline rose in her blood. The scream turned into a howl of feral rage. She clutched her bad hand closer to her body, using the stinging pressure to ward off any hesitation. 

The two of them circled each other, neither willing to make the first move. Not-Sasha wasn’t injured, but Melanie had a better weapon and rage on her side. Not-Sasha grimaced, her eyes calculating and predatory, looking for an exploitable weakness. Melanie bared bloody teeth. Not this time. 

She lunged forward, swinging wide so Not-Sasha couldn’t block her strike. Unfortunately, without the use of her other hand, she was completely exposed to the counter, managing to lean back just enough to avoid having her throat slashed, only cutting a small gash into Not-Sasha’s dominant arm for her trouble. Not-Sasha hissed, drawing back. She didn’t try to make a strike of her own. 

Not-Sasha knew Melanie, at least enough to understand how she fought. Melanie fought with brute force; she didn’t fight smart, especially when she was angry. Not-Sasha only had to wait for a good opening. 

And that opening came. Melanie struck out again and Not-Sasha avoided the clumsy upward slash, gracefully flowing into her own attack. The scalpel plunged into Melanie’s flesh, a frantic twist on her part only barely managing to avoid a fatal stab to her neck. As it was, the blade scraped the top of her collarbone on her unguarded side, drawing a scream. 

A scream that swiftly turned into a smile. 

Melanie deftly flipped the knife into a reverse grip and stabbed it between Not-Sasha’s ribs. Not-Sasha’s eyes widened and her grip on the scalpel released as she started to collapse. Melanie wrenched the knife back out as Not-Sasha fell, blood spotting her lips as she wheezed, struggling to breathe through her punctured lung. She stared up at Melanie, something like confusion on her face. 

Melanie winced as she pulled out the scalpel and let it clatter to the floor by her feet. She’d have liked to say something clever, but nothing came to mind. Instead, she turned around, leaving Not-Sasha there to choke on her own blood. She continued on, resuming her slow search for the exit. Except something — aside from her new injuries, of course — was different now. 

That strange word Not-Sasha had said, the presence lurking just beyond her senses. There was something  _ else _ in the asylum, something Melanie didn’t know the full scope of. Maybe it was shock, blood loss, trauma. Maybe Melanie was just going insane. But she couldn’t shake the feeling, couldn’t shake the  _ knowing _ , that Mount Massive’s goddess was very, very real. 


End file.
